THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS

"In Chile, the sun must first climb hills, cliffs, and summits before it reaches the last stone in the Cordilleras. In my country, the Cordilleras are everywhere, but to Chileans, they are unknown territory. After visiting the North for NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT and the South for THE PEARL BUTTON, I'm now prepared to photograph this immeasurable ridge, in order to explore its secrets and its powerful revelations of Chile's past and present." — Patricio Guzmán
This film concludes a trilogy that Chilean documentarist Patricio Guzmán began in 2010 with NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT and continued in 2015 with THE PEARL BUTTON. In part three, Guzmán, who has lived in exile in Paris since the coup d'état by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, observes the natural environment of his home country as an allegory of the political history of revolutionary utopia, fascist dictatorship, and neoliberal depletion of society. After focusing on the Atacama Desert — the driest area in the world, the most important location for giant telescopes, and also the location of Pinochet's concentration camps — and the Pacific Ocean, in which thousands of opponents of the regime were tied to railroad tracks and drowned, Guzmán now turns to the Andes Mountains. They cover 80 percent of Chile's land area and yet they are a blank spot to most Chileans — just like the horrors of the dictatorship and the unbroken tradition of resistance to them. Although these historical events continue to influence the political and economic reality of the country even today, they have been pushed out of the public consciousness. Guzmán's impressive documentary is thus also a work intended to raise awareness and active reappraisal.