Patricio Guzmán

After Patricio Guzmán had travelled to the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile for «Nostalgia de la luz» and to the deepest south for «El botón de nácar» in Patagonia, he deals in the last part of the trilogy on his homeland with the central chain of Andes and the memory of the moving images. All his films are personal, but in some respects he is the most intimate, leading the artist back to the ruins of the house of his childhood.

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.

In his documentary essay film, Chilean Patricio Guzmán takes a double look at the past: On the one hand there are the astronomers who look up to the sky in the Atacama Desert and explore the origin of the universe, on the other there are the women who search in the desert sand around the observatories for the mortal remains of their loved ones who have become victims of the military dictatorship. A journey into the light.