La cordillera de los suenos (2019)

Directed by: Patricio Guzman | 84 minutes | documentary | With: Jorge Baradit, Vicente Gajardo, Francisco Gazitua, Pablo Salas

Filmmaker Patricio Guzmán is Chilean by birth, but fled his homeland as early as the 1970s when, as a young revolutionary, he fell into disfavor with the ruthless dictator Augusto Pinochet. Guzmán now lives in Paris and only occasionally returns to Chile to film. Yet that does not stop him from making socially critical films that expose the soul of the South American country. Guzmán uses a narrative form that could be described as ‘geophilosophy’. He focuses on a part of the Chilean landscape and links this to reflections on Chile’s eventful and at times jet-black history.

After ‘El botón de nácar’ (in which the Pacific Ocean played the main role) and ‘Nostalgia de la luz’ (which linked the rough, bone-dry and inhospitable Atacama desert to the Pinochet dictatorship), Guzmán in ‘La cordillera de los sueños ‘ the look upwards. The backbone of the narrow and elongated Chile is formed by the mighty Andes, the longest and second highest mountain range (‘cordillera’ is the Spanish word for mountain range) in the world. The first part of the film is mainly a panoramic journey along and over snowy Andean peaks, an environment in which only the most robust organisms can survive.

Yet the imposing Andes in this film is more than just the setting for a beautiful nature film. The mountain range is mainly performed as a superhuman spectator who looks down wistfully at the horrors that plagued Chile under the rule of Pinochet’s military junta. Opponents were portrayed as traitors to the nation and underminers of national values, a demonization that allowed the persecution, torture and execution of critical minds and (mainly left-wing) opponents of the regime. The silent mountains are metaphorically presented as the silent witnesses to misdeeds that have remained largely obscured from the general public behind a veil of political propaganda.

Modern Chile is also treated to a critical reflection in ‘La cordillera de los sueños’. According to Guzmán, the sense of community is gone, which means that the modern Chilean ‘walks alone in the crowd’. The filmmaker sees a picturesquely beautiful, yet soulless country that still has not freed itself from the neoliberal robbery doctrines introduced by Pinochet and his cronies. Copper mining in the Andes, an economic activity dominated by foreign capital, mutilating natural landscapes and yielding very little to ordinary Chilean citizens, is a perfect example of this. One particular scene, zooming in on paving stones made from Andean rocks and featuring copper plaques bearing the names of victims of the Pinochet regime, connects the burden of the past with the darker sides of the Chilean present. It is also a reference to the message that this film conveys: the landscape in which he lives partly determines the thoughts that a person forms and the view he has on the world.

‘La cordillera de los sueños’ is a philosophical-realistic print that fuses beautiful landscape images, spirited social criticism, a good dose of symbolism and a historical retrospective on the Pinochet period into a compelling story. The lack of talks with former members of the junta forms a modest gap in the historical part, but does little to detract from the quality of the whole.