SELECTION OF CRITICS:

“Pure in its focus and vigorous in its attack, this 58-minute-long documentary achieves an intense poetry, obtained with its uncommon way of taking on the subject. Returning to his country with his epic work ‘The Battle of Chile’ under his arm, Patricio Guzmán explores the importance and fragility of political memory, presenting a painful collection of images of the Popular Unity’s government under Allende and its end with the bloody coup d’etat. What happens to a dream deferred? The film combines emotive reminiscences with provocative confrontations, like, for example, the visit to the scenes of the crimes as in the National Stadium of Santiago which, after the coup, was made a torture center and concentration camp. In the most extraordinary sequence, Guzmán films the reaction of men and women in the street when they hear the Popular Unity’s hymn “Venceremos” (We Will Overcome). At this moment, we are nothing less than witnesses to the revival of collective memory.”

Michael Sragow, San Francisco Weekly, USA 1998

“With his grandiose meta-documentary, Patricio Guzmán manages to make things reappear when he visits the survivors and with them reappear the faces of those who never returned.”

A & E., San Francisco Bay Guardian, USA 1988

“The film ends with an intense and terrible sequence: the shaken, troubled faces of the youths incapable of controlling the emotions that arise in them as they contemplate their own history.”

Cathérine Humblot, Le Monde, Francia 1998.

“The confrontation of a generation that has lived an indelible past, etched in its memory, with a youth educated to forget history, takes this film to a surprising level of quality.”

Leonard Klady, Variety, USA 1998.

“It turns out that the few shaky measures of the sonata “Claro de luna”, the leitmotif for the disappeared in the film, are played by the 80-year-old Ignacio, the filmmaker’s uncle. In the film we learn how Ignacio hid the material for ‘The Battle of Chile’ after the coup. At great personal risk (which he denies), he saved the irreplaceable document and turned it in to the Swedish embassy to be removed from the country. We now see Ignacio with his piano, trying, with his trembling hands, to remember this half-forgotten melody. He makes a mistake, starts again, makes another mistake. With a resigned smile, he says, ‘It’s the cripple who blames the piano’. He then softly and with meaning, makes an effort to fail again.”

Stuart Klawans, The Village Voice, USA 1998

“Guzmán lets us make our own conclusions and that is ultimately the only pending aspect in his new documentary. One hopes that the tragedy of the past doesn’t repeat itself and that those who have suffered this history will be vigilant.”

Leonard Klady, Cineaste, New York, N° 44, 1998

“The film is a battle against forgetting and the falsification of history, but above all, the film allows a fight against the collective amnesia programmed by Pinochet. As José Balmes says: memory and forgetting are like the positive and negative of human reflection, they make us suffer and die, but they also make us live.”

Joseph Colison, Les Inrockuptibles, Francia 1997