Featured Filmmaker: Patricio Guzmán
Patricio Guzmán was born in 1941 in Santiago de Chile. He studied at the Official School of Cinematographic Art in Madrid and has dedicated his career to documentary cinema. Between 1972 and 1979, he directed The Battle of Chile, a five-hour trilogy about Salvador Allende’s government and its fall. This film is the foundation of his cinema. Cineaste named it "one of the 10 best political films in the world." After Pinochet’s coup d’état, Patricio Guzmán was arrested and imprisoned for two weeks in the National Stadium, where he was repeatedly threatened by simulated executions.
In 1973, he left Chile and moved to Cuba, then to Spain and France, but remains very attached to his country and its history. He presides over the International Documentary Festival in Santiago de Chile (FIDOCS), which he created in 1997. The Cordillera of Dreams, presented in the official selection at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, closes a trilogy which begun with Nostalgia for the Light (Cannes 2010) and The Pearl Button (Berlin 2015). His latest film, My Imaginary Country, premiered as an official selection of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
-
The First Year
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2023 • 96 minutes
THE FIRST YEAR is a jubilant record of the 12 months following the election of Chile’s first socialist president, Salvador Allende. Director Patricio Guzmán travels the country, meeting workers who no longer have to answer to the capr...
-
Movie + 3 extrasThe Battle of Chile
Movie + 3 extras
On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende's democratically-elected Chilean government was overthrown in a bloody coup by General Augusto Pinochet's army.
Patricio Guzman and five colleagues had been filming the political developments in Chile throughout the nine months leading up to that...
-
Chile, Obstinate Memory
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 1998 • 58 minutes
Hearing only the official version, a generation of young Chileans has grown up with little knowledge of the historical facts surrounding the events of September 11, 1973. On that day Salvador Allende's democratically elected governmen...
-
The Pinochet Case
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2001 • 109 minutes
Augusto Pinochet, the general who overthrew President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, was the first dictator in Latin America—or the world—to be humbled by the international justice system since the Nuremberg trials.
THE PINOCHE...
-
Nostalgia for the Light
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2010 • 90 minutes
Master director Patricio Guzmán travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, where atop the mountains astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent ...
-
The Pearl Button
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2014 • 82 minutes
The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds the voices of the Earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile...
-
Salvador Allende
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2004 • 100 minutes
A leftist revolutionary or a reformist democrat? A committed Marxist or a constitutionalist politician? An ethical and moral man or, as Richard Nixon called him, a 'son of a bitch'? In SALVADOR ALLENDE, acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Pa...
-
Movie + 5 extrasThe Cordillera of Dreams
Movie + 5 extras
Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, master filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's The Cordillera of Dreams completes his trilogy (with Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button) investigating the relationship between historical memory, political trauma, and geography in his ...
-
My Imaginary Country
Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2022 • 83 minutes
One day, without warning, a revolution exploded. It was the event that master documentarian Patricio Guzmán had been waiting for all his life: a million and a half people in the streets of Santiago, Chile, demanding justice, education...
