“It was not until September 10, 2021 that The Battle of Chile was broadcast for the first time on Chilean television”, reports the site Ciper Chile. Abroad, however, the reputation of this trilogy on Chile by Salvador Allende, shot by Patricio Guzmán and released between 1975 and 1979, has long been well known. But Chileans will have had to wait forty-five years to clearly discover this multi-award-winning work on the democratic experiments carried out under Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and the enthusiasm they were able to arouse among part of the population, before until Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat occurs and the ax of the dictatorship (1973-1990) does not fall.
The shadow of The Battle of Chile, qualified by Ciper Chile of “the most demonized Chilean film in history”, hovers over my imaginary country, the new film by Patricio Guzmán, which will be released this October 26 in France. Providing the voice-over commentary, on a personal register as usual, the 81-year-old filmmaker, a big name in documentary, looks back on the social explosion caused in October 2019 by the increase in the price of the metro ticket in Santiago. , the days of massive demonstrations that followed, and the will to rewrite the Constitution that resulted from it, to finally put an end to that inherited from Augusto Pinochet.
Collective hopes and dreams
“There is a kind of umbilical cord between these two films, separated by almost half a century”, relief Ciper Chile. Patrick Guzman “depicts the joys, the angers, the pains, the claims and the collective hopes that were poured out during the social explosion [de 2019], acquiesce le site BioBio Chile, and in particular the desire for social struggles, for collective dreams. To rediscover joy, lost childhood and, above all, this interrupted youth” by the 1973 coup.
Nearly fifty years later, the outcome is just as brutal. September 4, by 62% of the votes