Nature & Animals influenced Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)

The desert is not the setting of this film, it is its argument. The Atacama is the driest place on earth, and both halves of the film exist because of that one fact. Almost no water vapour means almost no interference, which is why the large observatories are there and why astronomers can read light that left its source millions of years ago. The same dryness is why human remains do not rot in that ground, which is why the relatives of the disappeared can still find a piece of jaw or a foot in a shoe thirty years on. Guzman builds the whole comparison on a property of the place: one landscape that preserves the distant past perfectly and the recent past unbearably well.