Nostalgia de la Luz by Patricio Guzmán

“We cannot forget our dead”, says a voice in Nostalgia de la Luz, meaning that it is our duty to remember them. How can one forget a son murdered by a dictatorial power? Fortunately, or regretfully, the past is hard to kill, and even the origins of the universe are still talking to us. From strata of earth to relics of a civilization, history lives on. Most of all, crimes of the past, despite all the imagination their perpetrators use to hide them, remain as painful and haunting wounds.

We are all digging up a past, somewhere, and Nostalgia is a film softly woven by this metaphor. Here astronomers observe the sky, searching for answers light-years away above our heads. There women are searching for the bones of their husbands, sons and brothers wiped out by Pinochet’s political repression thirty years ago. Both are in the same Atacama desert in Chile, an empty land that strangely reflects the far reaches of the sky. Massive shots of galaxies create a leitmotiv in the film, as if to remind us of what we are made (the calcium in our bones is the same component as that of the stars) and where we come from.

The film begins with the clicking mechanism of a telescope opening, and the deep noise it generates powerfully evokes the gigantic order of the universe. Guzmán shoots it smoothly, with intimacy. Light permeates the film through fades of a dusty glow. It’s all there: shadows and light, what disappears and what stays. This is a struggle for life. It’s everyone’s responsibility to ban the punishment of oblivion from our societies.

By Romain Pichon-Sintes