Join us for an on-demand screening of The Cordillera of Dreams and a workshop featuring master documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán with translator Daniel Mosquera. Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (Nostalgia for the Light, and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his native country of Chile. It centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes that run the length of the country’s Eastern border.

At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the Cordillera serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’état.  The film screening (a benefit for The Sanctuary for Independent Media arranged by Icarus Films) is available on-demand during any 48 hour window through May 28, 2020.  Tickets are $12. In addition to our virtual screening of The Cordillera of Dreams we presented a Be The Media! workshop featuring a talk and Q&A with filmmaker Patricio Guzmán live from Paris on Friday, May 22, 2020.  Local filmmaker Daniel Mosquera, professor of Hispanic and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at Union College, will provide simultaneous translation.  

This event and screening is co-sponsored by iEAR Presents! and the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Rensselaer, made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

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About the Film:

Along the way, Guzmán interviews artists, writers, and documentarians, drawing out their conflicted feelings towards the Cordillera and its relationship to Chilean national identity and history. Among the interviewees are Vincente Gajardo and Francisco Gazitúa, sculptors who draw from the raw materials of the Cordillera to produce their artwork. Jorge Baradoit, a writer of history and fiction, discusses the continuation of Pinochet’s project in the social and economic structure of contemporary Chile. Musician Javiera Parra remembers the violence she witnessed as a child. The film’s prominent moral voice is Pablo Salas, a filmmaker and archivist who has worked since the 1980s to document acts of political resistance and state violence.

Looking at both the past and future, Guzmán’s work rescues Chile from the threat of historical amnesia. He considers how the neoliberal economic policies introduced under the Pinochet regime have continued to stratify Chilean society along increasingly rigid class lines. The Cordillera may form an omnipresent backdrop to the Chilean landscape, but, like so many parts of the country, much of it is privately owned and inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. Unflinching in its presentation of contemporary Chile, The Cordillera of Dreams moves beyond despair and looks towards the possibilities of political change by linking the ideological struggles of the past with the inequalities of the present.

Press about The Cordillera of Dreams:

“Guzmán’s late-career trinity is a stunning achievement in the cinema of the hidden pattern and the startling, unexpected connection.” —Variety

“Deeply personal. In this poetic documentary, Patricio Guzmán mediates on the past and future of his home country via the mountains that close it off from the rest of the world.” —Sight & Sound

“Recommended! A fitting capstone to the director’s elegy for Chile’s tortured past that restates the trilogy’s fundamental point: like the Andes, the nation survives, but people must remember their past.” —Video Librarian

“A prelude to Chile’s recent outcry.” —Americas Quarterly

“Whatever the future holds for his native land, Guzmán’s trilogy will have its place in their history.” —POV Magazine

“Deeply beautiful and very deeply felt…one of the world’s finest working filmmakers.” —The Boston Globe

About Patricio Guzmán:

From The Battle of Chile, filmed in black and white, on 16mm film, in the midst of social upheaval and revolution, to Nostalgia for the Light, filmed with modern digital technology, filled with vibrant colors, poetic connections and introspection, Guzmán’s epic body of work is the unprecedented record of one country’s journey and one filmmaker’s evolution.

Born in Santiago de Chile in 1941, Patricio Guzmán is one of the leading documentary filmmakers in the world. He studied filmmaking at the Film Institute at the Catholic University of Chile, and at the Official School of Film in Madrid.

After the 1973 Chilean coup Guzmán left the country and has lived in Cuba, Spain and France, where he currently resides. Six of his films have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, including The Battle of Chile, The Pinochet Case, Salvador Allende, Nostalgia for the Light, for which he received the Grand Award from the European Film Academy in 2011.

Guzmán’s The Battle of Chile remains one of the most widely praised documentary films of all time, and was named “one of the 10 best political documentary films in the world” by Cineaste. His films have been extensively screened worldwide and he’s been the subject of numerous film retrospectives, most recently at the British Film Institute, Harvard Film Archive, and BAMcinématek. In 2013, he was invited to join the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and last February he was awarded with the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlinale for The Pearl Button, his most recent production (which is due to open theatrically in the US this fall).

We are committed to lowering the barriers to access for events at The Sanctuary for Independent Media. For people who are hard of hearing or deaf, blind or low-vision, or whose physical limitations can interfere with a satisfying experience, let us know two weeks in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements.