Patricio Guzmán
Patricio Guzmán was born in 1941 in Santiago de Chile. He studied at the «Official School of Cinematographic Art» in Madrid. He has dedicated his career to documentary cinema. His films have screened in many festivals and received international recognition. Between 1972 and 1979, he directed «The Battle of Chile», a five-hour trilogy about Salvador Allende’s period of government and its fall. This film is the foundation of his cinema. The North American magazine 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 remained 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 lights (Cannes 2010) and The pearl button (Berlin 2015). His new film, My imaginary country, is selected at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
Filmography
2022 MI PAÍS IMAGINARIO
2019 LA CORDILLERA DE LOS SUEÑOS
2015 EL BOTÓN DE NÁCAR
2010 NOSTALGIA DE LA LUZ (Prix Arte: European Film Award Best Documentary)
2005 MI JULIO VERNE (TV)
2004 SALVADOR ALLENDE (Cannes Competition, Goya Prize)
2002 MADRID
2001 LE CAS PINOCHET (Cannes Competition 2002)
2000 INOVACIÓN
1999 LA ISLA DE ROBINSON CRUSOE
1997 CHILE, LA MEMORIA OBSTINADA (Grand Prix at the Festival of Tel Aviv 1999)
1995 PUEBLO EN VILO
1992 LA CRUZ DEL SUR (Grand Prix at the Festival sur les Docs, Marseille)
1987 EL NOMBRE DE DIOS (Grand Prix at the Festivale dei Popoli, Florence)
1983 ROSA DE LOS VIENTOS
1979 LA BATALLA DE CHILE: EL PODER POPULAR
1977 LA BATALLA DE CHILE: EL GOLPE DE ESTADO
1975 LA BATALLA DE CHILE: LA INSURRECCIÓN DE LA BURGUESIA
1972 LA RESPUESTA DE OCTUBRE
1971 PRIMER AÑO (Critics' Prize at the Mannheim Film Festival 1973)
1969 EL PARAÍSO ORTOPÉDICO (Prize at the Documentary & Short Film Festival Bilbao)
1968 LA TORTURA Y OTRAS FORMAS DE DIÁLOGO
1967 ELECTROSHOW (short film, prize at the Festival Latinoamericano de Viña del Mar, Chile)
Mi país imaginario (2022)
«October 2019: an unexpected revolution, a social turmoil. A million and a half persons demonstrated in the streets of Santiago demanding more democracy, a better life, a better education and health system and a new Constitution. Chile had recovered its memory. What I had been waiting for since my student struggles in 1973 had finally become reality.» Patricio Guzmán More
La cordillera de los sueños (2019)
After Patricio Guzmán had travelled to the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile for «Nostalgia de la luz» and to the deepest south for «El botón de nácar» in Patagonia, he deals in the last part of the trilogy on his homeland with the central chain of Andes and the memory of the moving images. All his films are personal, but in some respects «La cordillera de los sueños» is the most intimate, leading the artist back to the ruins of the house of his childhood. X More
El botón de nácar (2015)
The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all 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, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. More
Nostalgia de la luz (2010)
In his documentary essay film, Chilean Patricio Guzmán takes a double look at the past: On the one hand there are the astronomers who look up to the sky in the Atacama Desert and explore the origin of the universe, on the other there are the women who search in the desert sand around the observatories for the mortal remains of their loved ones who have become victims of the military dictatorship. A journey into the light. More
Salvador Allende (2004)
One from the heart, “Salvador Allende” is the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s plaintive look back at the rise and violent fall of the world’s first democratically elected Marxist president. Mr. Guzmán, who went into exile after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that led to Allende’s death, has returned to the country of his birth with a camera in hand and a storehouse of passionate memories. Alas, little of that passion informs the filmmaking in this documentary dirge, a memento mori about “the other Sept. More
