El chacal de Nahueltoro

Maybe the best Chilean movie, El Chacal de Nahueltoro lets me thinking about it many years since I saw at first time. This raw picture about Chile shows us a lot of topics: poverty that leds to violence, the system that improve a human being and finally kills him, the death penalty, etc. The images of this movie are impossible to forget. The work of Héctor Ríos (cinematography) and Pedro Chaskel (editing) is superb. The performing of Nelson Villagra is one of the best I've never seen in all movies (chileans and foreigns). Miguel Littin was unable to repeat such a success in his other movies.

watched it on DVD a few days back. To be very honest, it felt like i was hit very bad underbelly. The imagery and characters are so real and at the same time surreal. The feeling i had was i don't know why, similar to the one i had after watching bicycle thief. Though Vittorio was more realistic as accepted by all, but for me it was more like a nightmare than reality. And one has the same feeling after watching the movie. It feels that the nightmare would end here but it leads to another.The murders were so gruesome that it felt it was his imaginations or hallucinations.But why did he do it?In all probability he was desperate for shelter and food and this is what he got.But did he do all that he did to keep that moment with him forever and destroy the present,or it was a drunken fantasy he fulfilled to cheer his present life and surrendering to the cruelty of the world.It is a mystery and that is what we all are.

This movie has haunted me for over 30 years--since the one and only time I have seen it. The images that I recall were black & white in a straightforward documentary style, but much stronger than most due to its unflinching eye. The camera watches a grindingly poor Chilean "indio" meet a destitute widow and her several small children who have been evicted from their hut and cast into the street. Later, in a drunken rage at his own inability--and what seems to be his recognition that they will come to nothing better--he brutally murders them (the title is from a tabloid headline, I think). While awaiting execution he is cleaned-up, learns to read, and begins to have an inkling of consciousness of the world beyond. And that is the supremely powerful and heartbreaking irony: he has become the opposite of "The Jackal of Nahueltoro"--a good citizen.

I almost never run into anyone who has ever seen or even heard of this film, but in its own small way, it is a masterpiece.