The Pearl Button
classified 12A SPatricio Guzmán's beautiful, haunting follow up to Nostalgia for the Light is another fascinating journey through Chile’s troubled past, this time via its vast coastline, as he dives deep into an ocean of lost souls, forgotten tribes and political prisoners.
Using archival images and gorgeous new footage, Guzmán studies Chile's terrible history of repression, winding his way from a reflection on water to an examination of coastal tribes (who were all but wiped out in the 19th century with the arrival of colonial settlers), to the story of a tribe member, traded for a button, taken to London to be 'civilised', to more recent memories of the over 1,000 disappeared Chileans whose bodies were dropped from planes into the ocean during Pinochet's brutal regime.
Guzmán successfully recovers and reclaims Chile’s forgotten people and their remarkable, individual stories and folklore, in a haunting, melancholy journey through the Patagonian Archipelago, all volcanoes, mountains, glaciers, water... and memories.