DVDebut for Nanni Moretti's fine new documentary, SANTIAGO, ITALIA

Really? Something good came out of the horrific Pinochet dictatorship that ravaged the country of Chile during the 1970s and 80s? God knows, all this has been covered and re-covered in countless documentaries and narratives in the decades since then. Yet the new and ever-so-welcome SANTIAGO, ITALIA by the popular Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti offers something surprisingly positive, along with information and a situation that TrustMovies knew nothing of until viewing this gripping and moving new documentary. 

Not that Signore Moretti (shown at left) leaves out the bad stuff. No: His interviews with Chilean citizens who were imprisoned and tortured by the military at the time still horrify and disgust, as do those with former members of the military forever trying to justify and/or sleaze out of their actions back in the day. 

But the heart of this fairly brief documentary details how the Italian Embassy in Chile at the time of the coup and after managed to help rescue, then house and eventually ship safely off to Italy several hundred Chilean dissidents. As we hear from these Chilean-Italians, their stories of the time of Salvador Allende and his and Democracy's death in Chile become a kind of mosaic, of things we knew and plenty we didn't, about how various embassies (there were other good guys, in addition to Italy) helped those being persecuted by the new dictatorship.

Filled with archival footage (above and below) that shows us Allende (above, center) and the time period, and then fills in the history via interviews with Chileans in numerous walks of life -- factory workers to musicians, journalists, artists and filmmakers (Patricio Guzmán is one of these) -- the documentary works its way up to the good news about how many of these people were saved.

Early on, one woman recalls how Chile under Allende "was a whole country, a whole society in a state of love." Except it wasn't, of course. Allende was faced with two choices, one interviewee explains: Strike while the iron is hot and nationalize industry or try to placate the bourgeoisie. He chose the former, more progressive model (unlike America's centrist Democratic Party that keep us moving toward the wealthy, powerful and corporate). Although democratically elected, Allende and his socialist policies were hated by many right-wing bourgeois and upper-class Chileans, so with the help of America, the military coup took place. 

All of this has been told and seen many times over. What Moretti brings new to the table is the tale of that Italian Embassy (above) and its good work. His movie is so full of solid, smart information that attention must be paid throughout. The payoff is worth it, for his interviews are often exciting, funny and very moving. My favorite is the story of a grandmother who must toss her baby grandchild over the wall of the embassy and what subsequently occurred. 

What happened to the "saved" Chileans, how they got to Italy, found employment (and much else, too) and, though hoping to return eventually to their homeland, finally settled in Italy is simply a marvelous, engaging story. But, as encouraging and hopeful as the documentary often is (as are most of Moretti's movies), this one ends on a realistic, near-negative note. We can only hope that Chile, Italy, and -- hello -- the USA, too, will take a different course before the opportunity for change runs out.

From Icarus Home Video and Distrib Films US, Santiago, Italia, in Spanish and Italian with English subtitles and running 84 minutes, hit the street this past week and is available now on DVD (and eventually via streaming). It's a must-see for history buffs, lovers of Italy and/or Chile, and progressives of all countries.

Poet, politico, man and myth: Pablo Larraín's multi-faceted biopic/fantasy, NERUDA

Older Americans of a progressive slant will be familiar with the Nobel-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, I suspect. But unless they are very familiar with the man's history, much of NERUDA, a new film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, whose new film Jackie is also currently playing (and will be reviewed here next week), may strike them as surprising and bizarre. That's just fine, however, because -- from what TrustMovies can gather about Larraín's film -- this is indeed a kind of fantasia of what-if? and what-then?

The movie builds off facts, all right -- what we may already know about Neruda's life and art -- and what the screenwriter, Guillermo Calderón (of The Club), does in his very nearly completely invented story, is to wrap it all around a real time in Neruda's life (the 1940s) when he had to go on the run from the anti-Communist Chilean authorities who were (as usual and as a few decades later: remember Pinochet?) in the pocket of their North America "teachers." In filming Calderón's screenplay, Señor Larraín, pictured at right, has given us his most poetic movie so far.

Neruda may move slowly but the tale it spins is strange and gorgeous, witty and ironic, buoyant and sad. In the leading role is an actor who looks remarkably like Neruda himself (at least in some of the extant photos we can access, as the one below), Luis Gnecco (shown at left). Gnecco captures the artist, the politician, and the man equally well, succeeding in making us understand how Neruda was able to concoct the myth that surrounded him via the help of both his friends/fans and even more so with the help of his enemies.

After all, when the right wing calls you a traitor to your country, isn't it rather a badge of honor? Pablo was evidently a man of very healthy appetites, many of which are shown us throughout the movie. And yet it is hard not to love him for his excesses, as much as for his talent and political savvy. But Señor Gnecco shares screen time with a co-star much better known in America and internationally, Gael García Bernal (below), who plays a fictional character named Óscar Peluchonneau, a full-of-himself policeman who is given the job of finding and arresting (or maybe even killing) Neruda.

Óscar also narrates the film, and a more unreliable narrator would be hard to come by. But this is part of what makes the movie so often such fun. The policeman's idea of life and art and his place in it all is far afield from any reality we can see, and as the film marches forward, Óscar's ideas grow funnier but also sadder, even a bit poignant.

Mercedes Morán, a beautiful actress with wonderful access to emotional depths (shown above), plays Neruda's woman, and she's a pleasure to watch in all her scenes. Also in the cast is Larraín regular, Alfredo Castro, in a role small enough that you might miss that notable face.

The movie plays with politics and art, reality and fantasy, storytelling and the "heroic protagonist" (this is the role our Óscar dearly wants to assume) -- all to very good effect. It is beautiful to look at, as well, never more so than in the film's final scenes in the snowy Andes mountains where predator and prey will finally meet. Sort of.

Along the way we get snippets of Neruda's poetry, too, and if I have not made if clear that more than a passing interest in this poet is probably a requirement of the film, then let me do that now. I suspect that Chileans probably flocked to the film in a similar way that Americans will do with Jackie, a north-of-the-border mythmaker in her own way.

Meanwhile, Neruda -- from The Orchard and Participant Media, running 107 minutes, in Spanish with English subtitles -- opens tomorrow, Friday, December 16, in New York City at the IFC Center and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal, and in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. In the weeks to come it will hit a number of other cities, too. Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates.

Chile, Pinochet, Allende and the sea: Patricio Guzmán's placid, lovely THE PEARL BUTTON

Those of us who have followed the career of writer/director Patricio Guzmán have seen this documentary filmmaker grow and change from a young(er) man covering the dreadful fall and murder of the democratically-elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende -- thanks to the nefarious and illegal efforts of our own nation and its sleazy right-wing leaders -- to an older, seasoned and increa-singly mystical man who must continue covering the horrible events that happen-ed to his country.

With his latest effort, THE PEARL BUTTON, we see the filmmaker (Guzmán is shown at right) moving from the angst and anger of his youth into even more of the quiet, calm acceptance of what has been -- together with the kind of mystical, encompassing understanding that seems to come to some of us with age --  that was such a part of this filmmaker's last documentary, Nostalgia for the Light. While Nostalgia/Light looked up and outward into the skies and to the universe to find solace in the understanding that both the stars out there and the bones of the Chilean dead (and living) are made of calcium, The Pearl Button considers the great sea that partially encompasses Chile and how it, too, has served as solace, provider and graveyard for its people.

This is not to say that, by accepting the past, Guzman is in any way condoning it. Hardly. This man appears to have lived and worked to do as much as he can to keep Chile's awful past current in the minds of his countrymen. It's just that he is now doing it in a more thoughtful, philosophical, even poetic manner -- and the result is a movie that moves us via its beauty, as well as its unearthing of not-so-ancient horrors.

In fact, the Allende regime, together with its disgusting replacement by Pinochet and his minions, does not even come up until past the film's halfway point (the documentary lasts but 79 minutes). Prior to this, we get a strange and amazing history of the indigenous tribes of Patagonia (above), in Chile's southern extreme: how they lived via the sea, how they devoted their bodies (below) to providing a canvas for their art and myths, and how they were at last wiped out almost completely in a genocide that pre-dated by maybe a century or more Pinochet's attempt to wipe out Chile's "socialist" population.

Visually The Pearl Button offers some gorgeous location shots of Chile's ocean venues, its glacial areas, as well as its more verdant locations. We see rain and ice and the original native population -- what's left of them, anyway. We meet poets and scientists and those natives themselves, and finally a few of the folk involved in and with the many "disappeared" who were tortured and murdered during the Pinochet regime.

This is a constant in Guzman's films, though here it is used in a manner much more quiet and subdued than ever before. In fact, there are really only two major disappeared people who are important to the film. One is a young schoolmate of Patricio's who drowns and is never found (the first "disappeared," the filmmaker call him); the other is Marta Ugarte, a woman whom we know mostly by the extraordinary and extraordinarily awful manner in which she died. This is told to us quietly, as is all else in the film, but Ms Ugarte stands in remarkably well for the rest of the "disappeared." As for the impunity offered to so many of the torturers and murderers, "This is," notes Guzmán, "like killing the dead twice."

The movie is, by turns, pantheistic, mystical, challenging, thoughtful, poetic, and sad. We see geography as destiny, and history as horror that only repeats itself. If Guzmán gives this genocide to us filtered through a kind of mysticism, given a subject this awful -- this difficult to comprehend and tolerate -- I am beginning to wonder how else it can be done? I'm stymied. If you have a suggestion, please feel free to offer it up.

Meanwhile, The Pearl Button, from Kino Lorber -- the title of which harks back to those aboriginal natives and one of their number, dubbed Jemmy Button, who (just as does the main character in Malick's classic, The New World) travels to England to discover "civilization" and is paid for his trouble with that titular button -- opens this Friday, October 23, in New York City at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema. In the weeks to follow, it will open in seven more cities. You can click here (then scroll down) to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.

Kerry Candaele's doc FOLLOWING THE NINTH: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony

Who doesn't like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, particularly that final movement, with its evergreen "Ode to Joy." Hell, even Adolf Hitler loved it, using it to inspire his Nazi hordes. You won't learn about Hitler's love for this musical classic via FOLLOWING THE NINTH: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony, however. No: For that bit of information, you'll have to see a much stronger, provocative and chal-lenging documentary, The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Coincidentally enough, both movies open in New York City this Friday. For those who simply want to revel in the beauty of the Beethoven, while being fed reams of feel-good information and first-person testaments about how the symphony -- as Kerry Candaele (shown below), writer/producer/director of Following the Ninth, explains upfront -- "200 years after its writing, continues to inspire struggles for freedom, survival and healing during dark times," here's the film for you!

Yes, Beethoven's Ninth is a great piece of music. And the Pinochet regime of torture, murders and disappearance in Chile was a horror; China's student protests and the Tiananmen Square massacre, was a one-off jolt backward in that country's extra-long march toward some kind of freedom; while the post-WWII division of Germany into East and West, together with the construction of the infamous Berlin Wall was yet another, major slice of repression from Communism's Soviet leaders. But the documentary that results from the awkward conjoining of all these (plus a trip to Japan where, unless I missed something, there is no struggle for freedom but instead merely a festival honoring Beethoven's Ninth that occurs each December) is simply silly and wrong-headed.

The fact that in Chile and China protestors (shown above and below) were inspired by the symphony is worth an anecdote (just as Slavoj Zizek uses the Hitler/Ninth Symphony connection in The Pervert's Guide to Ideology) rather than a whole movie. Mr. Candaele forces the issue then comes to a kind of feel-good conclusion that I found almost insulting to Chile's followers of Allende who became victims of the Pinochet regime, as well as to the Chinese students.

The individual stories we hear from Chilean progressives and some of the Chinese students today are interesting and moving  -- there's a particularly surprising bit of information about one of our narrators who shares a history with the President of the Chilean Republic -- and the young woman who tell her story about growing up in East Berlin and what happened to her family is also worth hearing. Any one of these country's/people's stories might well fill up a film. But the connections of all this to Beethoven's Ninth are tenuous indeed.

In addition, neither the constant cutting back and forth between countries and tales nor the unnecessary inclusion of some moments of would-be "dance" (above) serves the movie well. The documentary's division into four chapters to ape the movements of the music is another needless stretch. I am guessing that the filmmaker's great love for the symphony inspired him to make the movie. This is commendable, but the result is certainly not.

FOLLOWING THE NINTH: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony opens this Friday, November 1, at the Quad Cinema here in New York.

Macarena Aguiló's THE CHILEAN BUILDING probes Pinochet's Chile from a new angle

After everything we've seen concerning the last half-century of Chilean history, including the hope and promise of the democratically elected Allende government, its betrayal from within and without (the disgusting and illegal efforts of Nixon and Kissinger) and the horror of the subsequent Pinochet dictatorship -- all this would take in countless documentaries, docudramas, poignant philosophical musings and narrative films -- nothing I have witnessed has had quite the same odd impact as the surprisingly quiet new documentary, THE CHILEAN BUILDING, opening this coming Monday at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem.

If your first thoughts regarding the title of this doc run to the likes of, "Oh, that must be the building in which left-leaning citizens were tortured" (as did mine), forget it. The titular building can be found in Cuba, and it was the final home, after trekking across Europe, for more than 60 Chilean children whose parents, back home in Chile, were fighting against the Pinochet regime. Consequently any living relatives of these "freedom fighters" were possible fodder for kidnap, torture and murder by the dictatorship. Children were especially vulnerable. In fact, the film's director, Macarena Aguiló (shown above) was herself kidnapped as a child -- a ploy by the dictatorship to get at her father, who was then in hiding.

This "plan," which came to be known as Project Home included some 20 Chilean adults who supervised the more than 60 children, including Ms Aguiló -- whose mothers and fathers were members of the leftist organization Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), some of whom were never seen again -- through their childhood and/or adolescent years to adulthood. TrustMovies never realized that such a program existed, but it makes perfect sense in terms of safety for the children, while freeing the parents to do whatever they had to, without the additional fear for their offspring.

The program began in Europe, with France and Belgium especially helpful (we got a taste of the French allegiance in Blame It on Fidel), and then moved on to Cuba, where that building of the title came to be the home for the kids. The documentary itself is very sophisticated, both in the way it uses so many different elements to tell its story -- home movies, interviews, animation (lovely simple hand-drawn stuff by Nestor Perez), drawings, maps -- and the viewpoints it encompasses: that of the filmmaker herself, who is a part of this Project Home; of the parents lost to their children in one way or another, alive and fighting or dead and gone; and the surro-gate parents. Most interesting and moving is the fact that Aguiló lets us see the children and the parents -- both then and now.

To hear the older adults speaking of the revolution and what it meant to them is sad because, of course, little has happened in the forty years since. The idea -- the dream -- of equality lingers still. Aguiló talks to her adoptive dad and shows us her "three social siblings" in The Chilean House. One man talks of his mother back then: "She had chosen a clear and concise action, and I could not go with her." This sort of thing makes one grow up fast.

The film is full of funny moments, too. In Cuba, the women envied the way the Chilean men worked around the house doing the chores. "Our men would never do that. We were jealous!" The movie also gives us a sense of what communal life was all about. MIR, we are told, was fond of Project Home, but also could be critical: Kids could never correct adults, it seems, even when the kids were right. Eventually, the Project Home children found respite in the La Beca school, "where the adults understood us."

We learn about the "fake" lives that the real parents were living in Chile, with fake names, fake friends, fake everything. "Yet often they had real feelings, even for their "fake" friends," we are told. The film and its participants try not to allow emotions or tears to cloud up the commentary, but every so often feelings escape, and the film becomes all the more moving for the individuals' attempts to block this. One of the parents explains, "Reality proved more stubborn that we had predicted, and we saw that things were not turning out as we wished."  A father who had abandoned his children tells us, "I am not a part of the new life they built, and I don't want to be. That's the price of protecting a country, and of fighting a dictatorship."

What this movie finally gets at, and about as strongly and precisely as I have seen, is the price we all must finally pay for past actions. As another young woman explains it, "What these families are experiencing is the need not to risk damaging all that they have built up -- their life, which is dangling by a very narrow thread -- by talking about the past." And yet, as the filmmaker and her documentary tell us at the close: "Emptiness is a path that is only filled when you walk it."

The Chilean Building, from Magic Lantern, is a movie worth experiencing. Filmed in Chile, Cuba, France and Belgium, the documentary, lasting 96 minutes, will open for a week's run at the Maysles Cinema, beginning this Monday August 13  through Sunday, August 19, showing nightly at 7:30pm. Click here for directions.

Dam it? Brian Lilla's important new doc, PATAGONIA RISING, explains why not.

I have long imagined Chile's Patagonia region to be arid, windswept, dry and uninviting, but maybe I've taken most of my cues from the late Bruce Chatwin and his once-popular book. Seeing the new documentary PATAGONIA RISING -- directed, shot and edited by Brian Lilla -- certainly opened my eyes to the beauty of the place, and particularly to its two major rivers, the Baker and Pascua, and the water flow from each, which is currently planned to be stopped by dams, in order to provide better energy for the country of Chile. The fact that the company that owns this energy project is in Spain, immediately sets up a reg flag about the downside of globalization (is there an upside?), which those of us who have seen other documentaries from Last Call at the Oasis to Cool It and even narrative films like Quantum of Solace and Even the Rain will already be well aware of.

Mr. Lilla, shown at left, has given us a film of great beauty (the vistas here are incredible) and not a little interest and importance, for if these dams get built, the damage they will do to our already fractured environment (not just Chile's but the world's oceans and who knows how many more endangered and/or soon-to-be species) is staggering. This is hardly what our globe needs just now. Going into Patagonia Rising, TrustMovies didn't know all that much about dams and hydroelectric energy, except to note that where these dams have been built of late -- in particular China but also in the country of Chile itself -- terrible population displacement has been seen with little recourse for the people displaced.

There is much more that is negative about this kind of energy, and one of the strengths and pleasures of this doc is how well it helps the viewer understand what these negatives are, how they will affect the local area, and what energy alternatives are available (such as wind energy, above, and an even better source, solar power, that Chile has the ability to tap into, bigtime) that would create even more energy -- renewable, sustainable -- than the dams themselves, at almost no cost to the environment. (You'll learn here the difference between the terms "renewable" and "sustainable," too.)

The filmmaker allows the energy company and its representative to explain its side of the story, and we also hear from the local inhabitants, most of whom appear to be against the dams, though there is one fellow who tells us that -- yes, he knows his is an unpopular stance, but -- he is in favor of building the dams. His explanation of why has to do with his own economic gain, but you can't discount his right to "getting ahead."Another fellow who owns a business in one of the towna that will be affected is positive, to a point, but seems less sure of the overall effect of the dams.

As the film move along and we learn more about the proposed "project," it begins to take on some of the characteristics of the boondoggle laid out so well in last year's Oscar-nominated doc, Battle for Brooklyn. I wish that the filmmaker could have does more investigation into the Chilean politicians who are supporting the project. A look at their campaign coffers, or the connections certain people have to certain others in Spain, might explain a lot. But the movie never goes that far.

We hear mostly from those locals but also from various scientists who explains how and why the damage from the dams will occur. This, together with the great beauty of the documentary as it shows us the gorgeous, unspoiled landscapes is enough to make the film a must-see, as well as a cause worth taking up. Patagonia Rising -- from First Run Features and lasting 88 minutes --  opened today in New York City at the Cinema Village. Currently this is the only schedule playdate, but click here in the days to come, and perhaps there will be others. I hope so, for this is a quite an important documentary.

Pablo Larraín's POST MORTEM gives us Chile's Allende from an unusual angle

You couldn't ask for a more bizarre, nor more reflective image of Augusto Pinochet's take-over of Chile than the one Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín gives us in his new film, POST MORTEM. That image is simply one of bodies piling up over the floors, stairs, hallways -- everywhere -- in the morgue of Santiago. We've seen the attack on the Capitol per The Battle for Chile, and the horrors of the amphitheater in It's Raining on Santiago, but something as after-the-fact and mundane as the goings-on at a morgue is as much deadpan as dead. Whether all this happened as shown -- or was less obvious, or maybe much worse -- is beside the point. The images you'll take away, once you've seen this movie, will probably prove indelible. The movie itself? Not so much.

On the basis of the two films TrustMovies has seen by Señor Larraín -- Tony Manero and Post Mortem -- he'd say this filmmaker has a gift for dark juxtaposition: the homage to John Tavolta's character coupled to serial killing in TM, and now the military coup's capture and killing of its enemies reduced to a literal autopsy in PM. Larraín (shown at right) also understands how to take one of his country's seminal events -- the overthrow of the democratically-elected regime of Salvador Allende -- and view it from a sidelong glance so that it appears, on one level, less important than the story at hand, while at the same time exerting enormous force on everything from characters to events. He is also very good at showing us how adept was Chile's citizenry at ignoring or seeming to ignore what was going on all around it. (There's one hell of a great image in this film that makes both literal and symbolic the enormous repression of people, actions and ideas under Pinochet.

The problem, then? There's maybe 30 minutes of content here, attenuated to fill the film's more than hour-and-one-half running time. (This was true of Tony Manero, too.) That the attenuation is handled stylishly is helpful, but eventually it cannot disguise the paucity of event or the needless repetition in which the filmmaker indulges.

So many shots are held for so long -- hey, you want to know how to cook an egg?! -- that you may finally give in to your wish to yell "Cut!" aloud in the theater. There's a crying jag offered up by first one and then another character that lasts long enough to have you scratching your head to locate a purpose for its length -- other then, Gee, these actors sure know how to sob! And finally we have that repression/suppression scene, in which so many pieces of furniture are moved into place that you want to scream, "We get it. We get it, OK?"

Taking the leading role, as he did as well in Tony Manero, Alfredo Castro (above left, and further above) proves again that he can hold attention by virtue of his marvelously odd face alone. He does little emoting (other than that crying jag) but manages to sleepwalk through life, much in the way that Larraín seems to be telling us that Chile's population once did. As his odd lady love, who works and then gets booted from what passes for the low-end Chilean version of the Folies Bergère, Antonia Zegers (above right, and below) provides the emoting that's missing from Mr. Castro. They make a fine and interestingly mismatched pair.

Post-Mortem, from Kino Lorber, 98 minutes, opens this Wednesday, April 11, in New York City at Film Forum. Click here to view any upcoming, currently-scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.