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.

The women of Calama have spent decades walking the Atacama with trowels, looking for fragments of relatives who were disappeared under Pinochet and dumped there. From the record: Chacabuco, a nitrate mining camp turned into a concentration camp after the 1973 coup, and the bodies moved and moved again so that what is left to find is bone by bone rather than a grave. Guzman cuts between astronomers reading light that left its source millions of years ago and those women sifting ground, and asks why a country will fund one kind of looking at the past and not the other. The film is his, and the exile it is made from is his too.