Nostalgia de la luz - Heimweh nach den Sternen

"Nostalgia for the light" takes us on a journey through Chile's Atacama's desert. Throughout this documentary, Patricio Guzman becomes a key interlocutor weaving images, interviews and poetics. This story of a nation's history, pain, joy, discovery and the unknown pulls us into a well of thought.

A group of women search for their beloved ones killed during Pinochia's Military dictatorship. Astronomers discover the early beginnings of life. Archaeologists narrate the history of lost civilizations. They revisit the desert each time in search for answers to the same questions.

We shift through two realms through the ethereal sounds and sights that form throughout the film. The past, present and future constitute our lives. Amnesia is a nation's curse up until front- liners revive history.

The great telescopes of the Atacama desert, they look into the sky as well as our hearts. In our lifetimes the Pinochet regime tortured and/or killed over 60,000 people. This enthralling documentary, both sorrowful and hopeful, explores how stars, history and victims as well as survivors of an oppressive regime merge into one.

The images of a body with legs still chained and wrists bound, people digging in the desert for remains of their loved ones, a country that does not acknowledge the recent past, the testimony of a woman who lost her parents and drawings from the Chacabuco concentration camp merge with images of galaxies and supernovas, and talk of a current of energy, new life, pulsing through our existence. It is powerful stuff. Transitions and better organization are all that are wanting with this film.

This beautiful film will capture you emotionally, visually and intellectually. Patricio Guzmán's examination of light—its relationship to the past and what it illuminates of the future—is stunningly beautiful, insightful and very well shot. A scientist states early on in the film that there is no present only the past and future as the words he is forming with his mouth have already happened by the microsecond it takes for his voice to travel from his mouth to his subject's ears. It is this sort of abstract thought that permeates the films dialogue creating the mood.

The Atacama Desert in Chile is believed to be one of the driest places in the world. Some of its river beds have not seen water for more than 120,000 years. Because of its high altitude, nearly non-existent cloud cover, dry air, and lack of light pollution and radio interference from the very widely spaced cities, the desert is one of the best places in the world to conduct astronomical observations.

As a result, the world's astronomers flock to the Atacama to gaze out into the universe and to search for evidence and artifacts from the beginning of time. These "archaeologists of time" decompose the stars into their constituent elements one of which is calcium.

Elsewhere in the desert, other "archaeologists" search among the pebbles and dust for evidence of calcium. They are looking for bones. Or at least fragments of bones. They are the mothers, brothers, sisters and wives of Chile's disappeared. During Pinochet's military dictatorship many thousands of Chileans were abducted and killed and their bodies disposed of in the Atacama. Forty years later their relatives still search the desert for any sign or bone fragment that might give a clue to where their loved ones lie.

Patricio Guzman juxtaposes these two sets of archaeologists in his beautiful documentary, "Nostalgia for the Light". In many ways they both seek answers to the same question. They try to find the true meaning of life.

There are some very moving scenes in this movie. In one, a lady in her seventies sits in the desert, in tears, and proclaims that she will never stop looking for the remains of her loved one. In the other, a young Chilean astronomer, whose parents were killed by the government when she was only one, clutches her new born baby (this scene is just wonderful). She displays the transcendent wisdom of someone of far greater years as she explains how she has, through her work and observations, come to terms with their murder.

An unmissable movie.

http://sofia-notes.blogspot.com/2011/09/nostalgia-for-light.html

Chile's immense Atacama desert is the setting for this stunning documentary that looks at the parallel between astronomers and relatives searching for remains of loved ones.

We are firstly greeted with an array of huge vistas of space, images taken from the various telescopes trained on the universe. They are glorious to look at and so huge in scale they make you feel insignificant. As the film progresses we are introduced to a new story, that of The Disappeared, the thousands of people who went missing during the years of Chile's Pinochet regime in the 70's. We meet relatives who still hope that the remains of their loved ones will be found, so they can finally be laid to rest. Pinochet had a series of concentration camps in the Atacama desert, once they were salt mines. Prisoners were killed and their remains scattered through the desert. How many, or exactly where, is something unknown. For decades, relatives have come to the desert and spent countless days digging and searching for remains, body parts, fragments of bones. Occasionally remains are found, a closure for somebody somewhere.

The relatives we meet are full hope that they will find the remains of the loved one missing for over 30yrs. They long to have that knowledge, that piece of mind and that's why they return. It is devastating to hear these people, all women, talk. They talk of the hope they have at the start of each day and the despair that takes over after a fruitless day. They talk of being able to die at peace if they find their loved one. The idea that in modern times such atrocities were committed and that even today such little is known is so disturbing, showing the true horrors that humanity can commit. Yet through this horror, there is hope, small groups of people continue the fight to find loved ones and recover the truth.

The film draws on the parrallel that these two groups, the relatives and the star gazers lead simliar lives. They are both searching, searching for truth, for understanding. Both are working in the past, in that images from space are from the past, with light reaching us after something has happened, the relatives relive the past everyday hoping for some revelation. Somehow, despite the very obvious differences there is connection. Much of the connection and the film itself comes from the idea of space and scale. Footage of the Atacama shows it's immensity, small dots of humans work their way across tiny areas of a seemingly endless expanse. Mountains rise up, a toy like train crawls across the land. Even the telescopes are immense, the buildings they stand in, the mechanisms that run them are simply huge. The images, so huge and almost overwhelming fill the screen, just as the huge task that those searching for remains, searching for truth, fills the heart.

It is a beautifully made film, that is at once both fascinating and immensely sad, but offers hope that perhaps we live in a better time and that people are have been able to help keep the past alive.

More reviews at my site iheartfilms.weebly.com