The Santa Barbara International Film Festival is the highlight of my year. I go to four to six films a day for the ten days of the festival. Every year I want to diary the best films, but I am so busy, and so exhausted at the end of the day, that I never have. This year I have decided to be willing to throw a diary together, just to get one out there, when I see important films. This is tonight's report.
Seeing these independent films and documentaries makes mainstream Hollywood films look even more shallow, if you can believe that. It is a shame more of these films don't reach a wider audience. It took me a while to discover that documentaries with daunting topics--such as, torture or environmental catastrophe--are more often inspiring than depressing. Now I try to see as many docs as I can.
[Other documentaries proving a person or small group of people can make a difference: The Whistleblower, Yes Madam, Sir, The Road to Fallujah, and Someplace With a Mountain.]
I don't know how to embed iframe. Follow the link to get a sense of the visual beauty of this film.
Nostalgia for the Light trailer
The brilliant, exquisite film today was Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz). First of all, this is one of the most visually stunning films I have seen. Director Patricio Guzman departs from his previous documentaries, The Battle of Chile and The Pinochet Case, to discuss connections between telescopes located in the high, dry air of the Atacama Desert and the women who still search that desert for the bones of their loved ones, disappeared over thirty years ago. I'm not a fan of books, such as The Tao of Physics which, to my mind, generalize inaccurately from specific scientific principles to other real life phenomena. I felt this film did not do this. I found the mind-expanding ideas to be accurate until the very end, when perhaps a romantic phrase or two closes this spell-binding narrative.
What is the connection? To summarize this film is to cheapen it. My preference would be to simply say, "Trust me. See this film." But you don't know me, so just let me say that this mention of the ideas discussed does not do them justice.
The most basic connection is that astronomers are viewing light which originated billions of years in the past to learn about origins. The bereaved women wandering the Atacama are also looking into the past for information which affects our present day. When the women find evidence, archaeologists are brought in to find buried bodies.
Profound as the ideas are, the film is about people. When we reach a monologue, near the end, of a young female astronomer whose parents were killed in 1976, the groundwork has been laid for her sad and inspiring story and philosophy. It is worth watching for this alone. Without quoting, one aspect is the way in which this beautiful woman assuages her pain by considering her own place in the flow of matter and life from the big bang through the stars and into our very bodies.
Guzman explores several aspects of memory and the past, tying this notion to the accurate descriptions of Pinochet's concentration camp in the Atacama, which survivors have drawn with uncannily accurate detail. In the most stunning and perfect connection, Guzman shows the scientific spectra from the telescopes which indicate the presence of calcium. These stars are the factories which produced the calcium in the bones of the victims of the brutal Pinochet regime.
For the second day running, I have seen films depicting names of concentration camp prisoners, scratching out their names and dates in a determination to give meaning to their lives. This reaching out to the future, this plea for witnesses, is a plea to us, now alive and free. Will we find the courage to look at our history as clearly and accurately as we attempt to look at the early moments of the universe? Can we find our place in the flow of the cosmos from the past through to the future?
As I say, I haven't even come close to doing this film justice.
Here is a review focusing on the political aspect of the film , including further information concerning the horrors of the Pinochet dictatorship. Some 30,000 people are known to have been tortured. It is estimated that another 30,000 chose not to come forward.
The simple act of ordinary women searching the desert for bones has had a powerful impact in the real world.
Quoting her from memory:
There are fewer of us now. It would suit them for us to be gone. We are a problem.
Other reviews here, and here.
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StepLeftStepForward offers this tip for finding documentaries:
DOCALLIANCEFILMS.COM is an online portal of Doc Alliance for Video on Demand offering permanent access to 400 outstanding documentaries selected by the five partner festivals. Twenty new films are added monthly and these can be acquired through streaming or download.
It is an excellent place to spend a weekend. Many of the films are offered for free, including a new one each week, and the rest can be streamed or downloaded for a very low price. It is East-European heavy but there are works from around the world.