Film | THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS (2019)

DCP | 2019 | Directed by Patricio Guzmán | Chile | 85 minutes | Spanish with English subtitles Free admission. No registration required. Winner of the Golden Eye for best Documentary at Cannes, THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS (2019) completes Patricio Guzmán’s documentary trilogy exploring Chile’s past and present through its landscapes, following NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (2010) and THE PEARL BUTTON (2015). Narrated by Guzmán himself, the film turns to the Andean mountain range as a living witness to the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. Guzmán places archival footage of tear gas deployed by police on the streets of Santiago alongside strip mining operations that continue to extract resources from the Andes today, reminding us that the US-backed dictatorship—which exiled the filmmaker from his homeland—forever transformed the country, its people, and its environment. Cinema of Contamination stages contact, confrontations, and entanglements with enigmatic toxins and landscapes. Spanning suburban California, the Andean mountain range, a forbidden zone, and a poisonous forest, the series examines how to make meaning within ecological collapse and in the aftermath of dictatorship and war.