Take Five
Recommended at Cine las Americas
By Kimberley Jones, Fri., April 22, 2011
5) 'Nostalgia de la Luz'
Patricio Guzmán abandoned his homeland after he was imprisoned during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup and has now spent more of his life outside of Chile than in it. Yet his films – including the influential three-part documentary The Battle of Chile – circle back again and again to his native land for a recording of its blood-soaked past, a reckoning of its state-sanctioned sins. He returns once more in the rattling, ruminative, and majestic Nostalgia de la Luz (Nostalgia for the Light). This one defies easy categorization, for sure: Is it a film essay? A tone poem? An eye on the astronomer community in the Atacama Desert, a bone-dry and highly elevated landscape ideal for stargazing? A documentary exploration of the women who comb that same desert for the remains of their loved ones, dumped there long ago by Pinochet? Circle e) for all of the above, although that still hardly hints at the multitudes contained within this gorgeously shot stunner.
Saturday, April 23, 6:30pm, Alamo South Lamar
