Some documentaries show, some teach, and some transport. Patricio Guzman’s, Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia De La Luz) without a doubt belongs to the latter.
The destination of this journey is the rocky landscape of Chile’s Atacama Desert, home to the world’s driest climate. It is here, amongst salt and sand, that Guzman takes his audience back in time, without ever really leaving the present. Confused? Don’t be.
The core theme of the documentary is time; how quickly it’s lost, how long it resonates. Due to the desert’s unique geological make-up it acts as a natural embalmer, preserving anything that is left in its path. In Atacama, the present moment cannot be separated from its past. Rocks still display pre-Colombian paintings, sands are riddled with bones from Pinochet’s concentration camps, and the skies, the ever-clear skies, shimmer with light from past millennia.
Historians and astronomers gather in Atacama desperately seeking understanding in what they call, ‘The Gateway to the Past’. They ask questions about origins, about existence, about how this all came to be, but they are not the only ones searching for answers. There are the women, who, nearly thirty years on, are still looking for their dead. A foot; a jaw; an arm. Piece by piece they attempt to reconstruct the lost decades of the dictatorship; the lost fragments of their lives.
Through poetry and stunning visual juxtapositions, Guzman leads audiences across the heavens, to the realisation that the recent past is often the most lost.
Although highly politicised like his other films, The Battle of Chile (La Batalla de Chile) and Salvador Allende, Nostalgia for the Light, is told with a sensitivity that lends it to the realm of the spiritual. The connection between the celestial and the corporal, allows the documentary to resonate off the screen and into the hearts and minds of viewers. The softness, with which the message is conveyed, is where the beauty lies.
By Sophia Dakis
Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia De La Luz) is screening:
Sunday 15th May – 2:30pm (Chauvel, Paddington)
Sunday 22nd May – 1:00pm (Palace, Norton St)
Sunday 21st May – 4:30pm (Palace, Como)
Sunday 22nd May – 12:00pm (Kino Cinemas, Melbourne)
