Plenty of major doc-makers have dedicated themselves to being portraitists of their homelands, but no one has done it as relentlessly and righteously as Patricio Guzmán, for 35 years Chile’s defiant verité John the Baptist and activist laureate. Born in 1941 in Santiago and a comfortable middle-classer, Guzmán was enchanted with Allende socialism and then rocked by the 1973 Pinochet coup; his career since then has been committed to rendering onto film the exact dimensions of that disastrous takeover and its protracted, mysterious fallout. Beyond documenting Chile’s post-’73 history, Guzmán’s entire life project has been an active siege upon his homeland’s apparently pathological need for amnesia; in film after film, he cries out alone in the wilderness of a national culture still unwilling to face the Pinochet era’s cost in... More >>>