2010 documentary
Rating: 16/20
Plot: Filmmaker Patricio Guzman looks into the work of astronomers, archaeologists, and women searching for their loved ones' remains in the Atacama Desert.
The Atacama Desert--that spot of brown you can see on earth when looking at it from space, the driest place on the planet, a Mars-like terrain where a translucent heaven makes it a perfect place to search the cosmos. I'm pretty sure I could have just watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel or something about the desert, but director Patricio Guzman has other things in mind. This is a documentary about time, about memory as a gravitational force, about the pain of absence or loss, about where we come from and where we've been, about how a puff of air is capable of destroying a present that might not even exist, and about the stars' ability to preserve inner freedom. The Atacama Desert, it just so happens, is the perfect location for a documentary essay on those things because you've got all these scientists with their giant expensive telescopes taking advantage of the aforementioned translucent skies to get answers about our past while all these women are searching the dry grounds for answers about their own individual pasts. It truly is, as the filmmaker suggests, a "gateway to the past."
I have no background at all on Pinochet or Chilean history. You probably don't either, but you know what both of us can enjoy? Space porn!
The use of space dust (or something) was maybe overdone, but there are a lot of beautiful shots in this thing. My favorite shot was probably a dark silhouette searching the ground with a lone star in the dusk sky. It's the kind of shot that pretty much captures everything this movie is trying to say.
Like Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, another documentary about dark times in a country that the country hasn't quite shaken off yet, this depends a lot on visuals and has a lot of narration. They have some things in common stylistically. This one's much, much better though.
I don't know why I'm bringing that other documentary up. It doesn't seem very nice to pick on that movie while writing about this movie.
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