Original subtitles

“THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS”

Each time I pass over the Cordillera,

I feel as though I am arriving in the country of my childhood,

my country of origin.

Crossing the Cordillera

is like arriving in a place that is in the faraway past.

Everything seems unreal.

I feel somewhat like an alien.

The city in which I was born, Santiago,

greets me with indifference.

Each time I return, I feel that same distance.

I don't recognize the city that lies before me.

Ultimately,

I don't really know where I am.

It seems as though

more time has passed than is really the case.

I remember

a country in which I felt more at home,

with my family and my friends.

Nowadays, the smells are different.

They no longer resemble the air I used to breathe,

as if everything had disappeared

through the crevices in this earth.

In Santiago,

many people look at the Cordillera

only when they take the subway.

These frescos were painted

by my friend Guillermo Muñoz.

He lives in Spain.

I live in France.

Neither he nor I

has ever returned to live in our country.

We dream of Chile from afar.

The Cordillera, with its strength and its personality,

is the metaphor of this dream.

However, in my childhood,

I felt no curiosity for the Andes mountains.

My generation was far too busy

building a new society.

The Cordillera was not revolutionary.

Over the years,

my gaze has turned towards the mountains.

They intrigue me.

Perhaps they are the gateway

to an understanding

of present-day Chile.

The Cordillera is a mystery, it can't be explained, it just exists.

Looking at it, one is always...

in a dreamlike state.

It is the material of dreams.

The material of dreams, standing there.

And we are here.

We feel soothed and always accompanied.

It is like the back of a chair.

It doesn't fall forwards or backwards.

When I evoke the beauty of the Cordillera,

I mean its overall beauty, tragic, marvelous,

I mean its strength.

And its gentleness, too.

There is nothing gentler than its valleys,

those famous humid areas.

There is nothing gentler.

There are so many birds.

The way the grasses move.

The grasses and the llareta.

That plant which grows for over a thousand years,

forming green mounds.

And the wind.

Today, the Raco is blowing.

When it arrives, in the evening, you can smell a different odor.

The odor of the foothills of the Cordillera,

whose rocks are very acid.

In order to get to know the Andes and love them,

you must know the origins of this wind,

that blows across the mountains and speaks to us

through its music and its odor,

the aroma of the wind.

An odor of rocks, of vegetation.

This is reality, I am facing it.

I came back here.

I don't need anything else.

Being in the Andes

is like being inside a chest.

A chest that contains the profoundest poetic laws.

It is as if the Andes contained everything.

There are ravines, glaciers,

water in its purest state.

Everything happens within the Andes.

It is all within.

When you've lived in the Andes for many years,

you feel like you are inside a large, rocky container,

a rock that contains everything.

You enter into the area I showed on the map,

a labyrinth of gorges.

It is a labyrinth.

This is where we find the traces of our ancestors,

the Quechuas...

Our culture is 20,000 years old, not 500.

That's 20,000 years of traces.

This is a combination of iron and stone.

I use stones from my quarry,

and local wrought iron, too.

This, up here,

is the ship.

This craft is closely linked to the Cordillera.

It reminds us that half of our blood comes from Valparaiso.

The ship.

This is the Rose of the Winds.

We use it to read the position of the stars, to navigate...

That is how the other half of our blood arrived, by sea.

I am a sculptor, and the Cordillera told me what to do.

We are artists.

An artist is the guardian of his country's beauty.

An artist must watch over his country's beauty, wherever that is.

A country that leaves 80% of its territory abandoned is not viable.

It is not a reliable country.

The Andes represent 80% of Chilean territory.

Abandoned!

This country must take care of its Cordillera.

It must take care of 80% of itself.

The Cordillera is a great mystery,

it doesn't reveal its essence.

I say this because of my profession.

When I gather or extract a rock

from a mountain in the Cordillera,

I do so in order to open it and find out what is inside.

The Cordillera reminds me

of the need I always felt, as a child,

when I accompanied my father,

to find out what there was

behind each mountain.

It was a mystery to me.

I crossed one mountain,

and I discovered another one.

That's typical of the Cordillera.

We feel a constant need to know what lies beyond.

The Cordillera is an endless horizontal enclosure,

longer than it is high,

despite its 8,000 meter height, 6,000 in Chile.

This landmark is always present.

More than physical,

I believe it is a cultural landmark.

It is difficult to define, because I breathe it.

I am part of a landscape

with certain characteristics.

It is not a valley,

I live amongst the mountains.

Between the mountains and the sea.

These spaces form a kind of island.

They protect me, but, at the same time,

they isolate me.

I have always felt

that time passes more slowly in Chile,

perhaps it is because of this wall of rocks.

As I travel through the mountains,

I feel the past is closer to me.

I remember things I thought I had forgotten.

Santiago turns its back on the Cordillera, it doesn't look at it.

It doesn't go to it, doesn't understand it.

When I look at the Cordillera,

I see millions of years of evolution exposed.

As you penetrate further into the mountains,

you discover peaks

that weren't visible from the central valley.

What is more, you go back in time.

The further you go into the Cordillera,

the further you walk in, the further you travel back in time.

There are traces of worlds,

each one more ancient,

as you travel through the Cordillera.

I grew up

looking at the Cordillera, especially one volcano.

I asked myself many questions.

Many questions about this volcano.

Why is there a part missing?

Why do we see flashes above it?

There were stories about a big eruption

that occurred when my grandparents were children.

This volcano evoked a certain mystery.

When my brother was a kid,

he said something

that made sense to me, that the Cordillera was like a mother.

Even if you couldn't see her, you knew she was there.

I feel that the Cordillera is protective.

But I've sometimes thought of it as...

something that separates,

isolates us from all that is beyond it, from the whole world.

Geographically,

the Cordillera is like a wall that separates us from the world,

or like a wall

that protects us from the rest of the world.

There is this double aspect.

I like to think of the Cordillera as a sea

that makes us an island.

I like this idea of islands,

because islands create cultures that are closed and powerful,

with a strong local identity.

One of the biggest revelations when you enter the Cordillera,

on foot, on horseback, or in a car,

is that it forms a whole country,

that lives alongside ours.

In some places,

the Cordillera is as wide as Chile of the valleys.

The Cordillera has two dimensions: its width,

and its length.

The Cordillera

is like the image on the matchboxes, we imagine that if we reach up

and peer over the summit, we can see Argentina.

It's like a theatre set.

When I was a child, my first sight of the Cordillera

was on the matchboxes.

It is as though time has stood still.

Today's matchboxes are the same.

They inspire me to visit my neighborhood.

Between these walls,

my memories are stored.

This is where I was born and learnt to walk.

I played here

and learnt to be who I am today.

Years later,

when the house was no longer mine,

somebody painted the ruins.

By some miracle,

no skyscraper has been erected here,

and my camera is able to film

the ruins of my childhood.

Later on, I lived

in this other house with my family.

When I lived here, I was an adult and a filmmaker.

In the '70's,

when I was thirty, this was where I prepared

my documentary The Battle of Chile.

We were a small team of five.

We filmed everything:

first the enthusiasm, which carried us far,

us and the entire population.

Then,

the tensions that led to the coup d'Etat.

Each morning, we would leave here.

On the day of the coup,

I returned for the last time, with the last reel in my hand.

I never imagined that The Battle of Chile

would still be alive today.

This film is like the reflection of a past that is pursuing me.

The coup d'Etat

was a violent earthquake

that changed our lives forever.

We were caught up in a massive explosion.

We remained silent, imprisoned.

Millions of people felt a deep fear,

that we'd never felt before.

For years, we hid from our children

what had happened, and what was still happening.

I remember the insecurity

a child feels when he realizes

that the adults are distraught.

It still moves me, today.

That insecurity you feel

when you see that the adults, your parents,

are bewildered at the danger,

scared,

and rather puzzled, too.

Puzzled about the violence

that was taken to the extreme.

When I was a child,

I witnessed savage acts,

police raids during the night while we were sleeping,

they pulled us out of bed.

Soldiers with helmets came into our rooms,

they lifted up the mattresses,

they even searched the dollhouse,

supposedly looking for weapons.

A musician with weapons in his house, how absurd.

I remember being behind the railings in my school,

the Latinoamericano high school in Pedro de Valdivia.

I was clinging on with other children,

watching the tanks go by.

I remember

that the adults were completely distraught.

We heard everything that was going on.

People said that Victor Jara had died, they cried.

In my school, when I was very young,

the desks sometimes began to tremble.

Then, we would hear a terrible noise,

hellish.

It came from war planes,

flying very low.

Us children, in that classroom,

we were petrified.

We cried.

It was horrible to feel that force,

that deafening noise,

passing by, so close to the ground.

We were...

We began to ask the adults questions:

"Why is this happening?"

They placed me under house arrest with my family.

Those were four very hard years.

Four years of house arrest.

People under house arrest were hostages of the junta.

If something happened to a member of the military,

or a member of the government,

we could be sure they'd come to us that night,

that we'd be lined up against a wall,

or taken down to the police station.

I didn't have a lock on my door,

because I knew that they'd force it open.

We would often wake up with a machine gun here.

In the first days after the coup,

I felt extremely panicked.

Shut away in my house,

I played a lot with my daughters

so that they wouldn't realize what was happening.

I didn't dare go out into the street.

I started to go through my documents, in no particular order.

I didn't dare burn the journals,

or the newspapers and documents

that I'd gathered for the making of my film.

I didn't know what to do.

Three or four days went by like this,

until the police

came to my house to arrest me.

A long time ago,

when I was twenty years old,

the football World Cup took place here.

I came to watch the Italy-Chile match,

that was won by Italy.

But a few days later,

a miracle happened:

Chile managed to come third place in the World Cup.

We were ranked third in the world!

I remember that the party lasted for a few months.

Later on,

I came back to the stadium,

but as a political prisoner.

This time, there were several thousand of us.

I was held prisoner for two weeks,

without the military finding out

where my film reels were.

I remember perfectly

this view of the score board.

After that coup d'Etat,

I never lived in Chile again,

although I dedicated my whole career to my country.

Afterwards, I left the stadium, then I left Chile

to save my film reels.

During that time, other people carried on filming.

One of those people is Pablo Salas.

Pablo could have been arrested,

tortured,

or even murdered.

Miraculously, nothing happened to him.

Without him, we wouldn't have so many images

of the resistance against Pinochet.

For thirty-seven years,

he has never stopped filming.

He may be the only filmmaker in Latin America,

and one of few in the world,

to have filmed, for such a long time,

his own reality.

Thanks to his images,

we could reconstruct today

the years we lost of the history of Chile.

When did you start?

To film?

In 1982 or 1983.

And you never stopped.

I carried on until 1990, when Alwin arrived

and Pinochet left.

I went to Belgium for two years, I came back in 1994.

Then new directors appeared.

There are many young people.

Still today, there are young people

who make documentary films.

Whenever there is a protest march,

and I have time, I go.

I can always use it for my archives.

It's my point of view, I film, and if I get bored, I go for a beer

and call it a day.

On marches today, you film,

and you're bothered by cell phones, small cameras, a passerby.

It's very different.

The only time you can film properly is when things start to get rough:

when there are barricades, tear gas, water jets.

When that happens, there are less of us.

We can film the water jets, the flying paving stones,

and nobody gets in our way.

The worst moment is the best.

Of course, you get a better image.

I was on a march the other day,

people were panicking.

I climbed on something, and I filmed the cops arresting a guy.

I follow them, the police van arrives, they shove him in

and a guy with a cell phone walks into the shot.

They arrived at night to the neighborhood of La Victoria,

they surrounded the area and began the raid.

At 3 am, they shouted through loudspeakers.

They went from house to house.

They raided the entire area.

They took away all the men between 15 and 65 years old,

with no exception.

20,000 prisoners in a stadium.

We went to film the houses

on which they'd hung a red triangle.

A white sticker with a red triangle in the middle.

We asked, and we were told

that the military put the stickers on all the houses they'd raided.

They'd taken all the men,

an inconceivable situation anywhere else in the world.

We left.

We went inside a building

and between the 3rd or 4th floor, a window looked onto the stadium.

We saw that it was full of people.

The stadium walls were high.

I pulled myself up as high as I could and began to film.

The image isn't very good quality,

but you can see the mass of prisoners.

It was a concentration camp, the dictatorship being well established.

It was astonishing.

We filmed and then quickly left.

That was the dictatorship.

It was terrible.

Those raids were frequent everywhere,

not just in the poor areas,

in other neighborhoods, too.

There, they were less forceful.

The case of La Victoria

was extreme violence, they arrested all the men.

When I see Pablo's images,

I realize our lives took different paths.

Pablo is one of those who stayed.

I am one of those who fled.

But we both have

something in common:

we were marked

by the same utopia.

Now, I'd like to step

into his time machine.

I wanted to show what was happening.

To show it here, not abroad.

People knew about it abroad.

From the very first day: the prisoners in the stadium,

the dead in the Mapocho river, prisoners in the concentration camps.

It was shown abroad, but not here.

Here, they told us whatever they wanted.

When the demonstrations began, I wanted to show them here.

When the dictatorship finished,

I found myself with all these tapes.

I tried not to erase them, although I often had to.

These archives were created from nothing.

They came from my desire to show what was happening.

I got myself into this,

and I have to carry on, I don't know why.

I'd like to pass the torch on.

How long has it been?

It's been 27 years

since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship,

and each time I changed office,

I had to carry around all these tapes.

This is a twenty-minute tape.

20 minutes.

Later on, there were these kinds of tapes.

It is smaller,

and you can film 4 hours.

4 hours.

That's just how it is.

This is a hard drive on which you can store

1,200 hours.

This has changed our lives.

And look at the battery.

This one lasts for 3 hours.

Unimaginable, in those days.

At night, on "economy" mode, you can film everything.

If we'd had today's equipment back then...

I think I should have filmed more.

I had the chance, but I didn't do it.

I did what I could.

There was so much to do.

Murderers!

Damn cop!

Kill him, damn cop!

"All human beings

are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

They are endowed with reason and conscience

and should act in a spirit of brotherhood."

"Can an accomplice of torture speak on television?

No, he can't!

Can an accomplice of torture speak of democracy on television?

No, he can't!

Can an accomplice of torture speak of justice?

No, he can't!

Can a Catholic television channel stay quiet about torture?

No, it can't!

Eduardo Jara, died under torture:

television is an accomplice!

About the deaths during fake conflicts:

television is lying!

About the disappeared prisoners:

television is lying!"

Thirteen years of dictatorship,

stop the torture!

Don't hit me!

University of Chile free!

He will fall!

You can feel it!

Allende is here!

The leftwinger became

the enemy targeted by this firestorm.

He wasn't considered human by the right wing.

The right had assigned him, through the media and propaganda,

all possible and imaginable aberrations:

insensitive, atheist,

inhumane, unpatriotic,

child eater,

destroyer of the country and its institutions,

of the Church and national values.

The leftwinger became a demon that had to be eliminated.

As we said,

we reached a logic

comparable to the Nazi mentality:

seeing society as a single organ

of which certain elements were sick.

They even implied that some Chileans were cancers,

tumors that had to be eradicated.

Murderers!

154 women killed by the dictatorship!

We demand punishment!

No to impunity!

450,000 women tortured by the dictatorship!

Call a doctor!

Move away!

What happened in Chile was a storm,

I could call it archetypal:

Good against evil.

Evil, was the people,

civilians, unarmed people,

children, young people...

It was blindness,

a mythological blindness:

we are fighting demons.

A blindness that allowed the dehumanization of others

to the extent of torturing them with electricity,

butchering them, poisoning them,

mutilating them,

making them explode, making them disappear.

It was a kind of fury.

I'm at a loss for words!

During the entire dictatorship,

the Cordillera remained in its place.

Perhaps it watched us without us knowing.

I never thought of this before,

but I believe the mountain is a witness.

It has seen things that people tried to hide from us.

If we could translate what the rocks say,

we would have the missing answers, today.

What I and the others were able to film during the dictatorship,

isn't even 5% of the dictatorship's atrocities.

The dictatorship tortured, killed, drove people into exile,

it used intimidation...

None of that was filmed.

It wasn't filmed.

Witnessing torture, I believe that's something else.

That hasn't been filmed.

The images we have

give us an idea of how awful the dictatorship was.

We can imagine the rest.

That all happened during the dictatorship.

Nobody can say

that we didn't know, that we never knew.

We found out everything instantly, or soon after.

Fifteen or twenty years later, we can't say that we never knew.

Until Pinochet's arrest in London,

they continued to deny the disappeared. That was in 1998, 2000!

They continued to deny the disappeared and the torture.

They insisted that it was abuse.

Last week,

they said there were some "errors".

The others quickly rectified this: horrors, not errors!

Justice! We want justice!

Murderers!

I think that the actors of the coup and the dictatorship

believe they did the right thing.

They are still under the effect

of this spell,

I don't know what to call it, this bewitchment.

They thought they were fighting a deadly enemy

who was going to plunge the country

into terrible chaos.

And they are still under the effects

of this spell,

that makes them see this as an epic battle.

The few people who have managed to break the spell

and see what they really did,

killing defenseless men, women and children,

those people have two options:

anguish, discretion and withdrawal,

or denial,

which is the most common and easiest choice,

the one that gives you peace of mind.

I believe that all those people

will die convinced that they did their country good.

They are still under the spell.

Is denial ignoring the facts?

Of course.

Not ignoring them, reinterpreting them.

They interpret the facts from a very fascist point of view:

mythical, epic.

When what actually happened was ordinary, banal,

and heinous.

There was a continuity between the civil political putschists

and those who governed for nearly the whole of the '90's.

They were accomplices.

A new cloak of silence was established.

Salvador Allende's remains were returned

and they were buried again.

It is a metaphor.

They take them out of one hole to quickly put them back in another.

That left the country

in the dark about what had occurred.

These paving stones have been here for many years.

They are made of rocks from the Cordillera.

When I was a child, I loved to step on them.

I used to break free from my grandmother's hand

and step on them, one by one.

Later on, those paving stones were the first

to feel the footsteps of the terror marching through the city.

People

discovered the sound of the tanks

and military trucks.

During the night, they heard noises that nobody had ever heard.

In the morning, they saw people following other people.

When they went outside,

they walked in fear.

If the rocks from the Cordillera could speak,

they would speak of the blood that ran over them.

Here, are engraved

the names of some of the victims.

There are crimes they don't admit to, and they never will.

They say it was abuse, they have never issued a mea culpa.

That is the worst thing about today's situation.

We ask

for them to acknowledge their actions.

They say they were mistakes, that they took things too far.

But they are happy with the economic system.

They continue to abuse, and benefit from the economic system.

They continue to get rich.

It's true, the country has developed.

There are almost no slum areas left now.

Today, poor people have cars, cell phones.

Their lives have changed,

they have much better lives than at the end of the dictatorship.

But the social differences are huge.

Just look at the posh neighborhoods, the seaside villas,

or the mountain chalets...

Or the lakeshores, they own the lakes!

All the beautiful lakeshore spots are private.

We can't access them.

That's just the way it is.

They are still in charge.

The differences are huge.

They've made highways that link their neighborhoods to the airport,

without passing through Santiago.

It's an unbelievable situation.

These people use and abuse what Pinochet left behind.

And still,

they congratulate themselves on their achievements.

Still today, the coup d'Etat is the winner.

We can't forget that the coup d'Etat

was two things:

the establishment of an economic model,

and the institutional structure on which it relies.

In other words, neoliberalism, and the 1980 Constitution.

All of that is still in place.

What happened after the coup d'Etat?

After the military coup,

neoliberal Chile is not only an economical experiment,

it's the establishment of a perception of the world.

Neoliberalism introduces the idea of profitability,

not just for business, but also in life.

In art, culture,

health, teaching, everything must be profitable.

Chile is a stable country for foreign investors.

To attract them, they are told that if they come here,

there will be many advantages and nobody will bother them.

There will be no trade unions, no problems,

there will be no risk to their money in this stable country.

How did this stability come about?

A very long time ago, at the beginning of our Republic,

this stability was born from the use of force.

In Chile, there are ghost trains that circulate at night.

They come from the mines near to the Cordillera.

They remind me of the old trains

that crossed the Andes to get to Argentina.

They carry minerals to the port at any hour,

but especially at night or at dawn.

Everybody is used to seeing them pass,

and nobody asks any questions.

They have no fixed timetables, and they carry copper,

Chile's main wealth.

Sometimes, they stop at a red light,

but nobody knows their schedules.

These invisible trains

travel close to villages with no names,

home to invisible women and men.

In Chile, what cannot be seen does not exist.

We say to ourselves, "something is wrong."

Our soul is sick.

Chile's soul is rotten.

It's extraordinary that there are so many rich,

so many Chilean and foreign millionaires,

in this poor country that lives only from copper.

Copper, which...

in the '60's, was owned half by Chile,

and under Allende, became 100% Chilean.

Today, the Chilean part

is less than the foreign part.

Foreigners take most of our copper.

I don't know the percentages.

The company that mines the most Chilean copper

is foreign, not Chilean.

The military screwed us over, they perverted us.

That is the dictatorship's triumph.

The dictatorship triumphed by handing over the country.

They sold the country.

Snow covers this landscape in the middle of the Cordillera.

If we look for this place on a map,

it is very hard to find.

There are no public byways to visit it.

Nobody can come here without permission.

This is an immense Chilean territory

that is not Chilean.

In some provinces,

80% of the land is private property.

The skyscrapers have not yet invaded

Santiago's neighborhoods with the oldest houses,

that look like a wasteland.

To my great surprise,

these soldiers appear before my camera

and trigger a memory.

When I was a child,

my grandmother used to take me to the national holiday parade

that I had almost forgotten.

The music is still the same.

These are Pinochet's former offices,

he presided over the military parades for 20 years.

I am interested to enter this abandoned building

that is full of ghosts.

I can see the shadows of the generals

walking on these carpets and giving orders.

This is where Pinochet validated the program

proposed by the economists of the time.

They brought the model directly from Chicago.

When they were young students,

they learnt the economic formula to change a country.

The Chicago model

was the most radical formula that existed at the time.

In a country with no freedom,

they were given total freedom

to implement their ideas.

They are still proud, today,

that Chile was the first country

to apply them.

Pinochet appointed them, one by one,

ministers of Economy and Finance.

They demolished everything.

It was the beginning of the end

of the country that I loved.

Today, other neoliberal economists

are appointed in each Chilean government.

I am afraid that this is a universal phenomenon.

The cars in this cemetery

are like objects lost along the way.

They have become useless.

Just like the cars,

everything Chile used to be was discarded.

In the streets of Santiago,

people get lost trying to find their way.

They walk about without meeting each other.

The city resembles a labyrinth.

This social organization of society makes Chileans sad.

Chileans

like to talk to their neighbors, to form neighborhood groups,

or political parties, like before,

in the squares, those meeting places.

You just have to travel through the cities today,

to see that people, nowadays,

walk alone in the crowds.

I believe the sadness of this country is due,

not to the model itself,

but to being part of a system that goes against its nature.

There's a path, but nobody knows where it leads.

Justice! Truth!

No to impunity!

Human rights mobilize people less than before.

Today, it's about women's rights,

abortion, education,

retirement.

Those are today's actual problems.

Problems of repression,

torture and disappearances no longer exist.

But injustice is still the same.

Nothing has changed.

Except there are no deaths, no disappeared people.

The situation remains the same.

I got involved with this and I'm stuck in it,

by my own choice.

All I want is to preserve a trace

of what the dictatorship was like,

how we live, how we used to live, to show that to the young,

so that none of it is forgotten.

And you realize that people don't want this.

The song of joy

The cheerful singing

Of he who awaits a new day

Come, sing, sing as you dream

Live dreaming of the new day

The day when men

Will live once again as brothers

We will always be more!

Pinochet's system remains in place today.

An economical system

that favors the rich and extorts the poor.

If you fail to pay a bill, the fines are heavy.

If a rich person wants to buy a bank, he asks for a loan,

and is given a very low interest rate.

If a poor person buys a pair of shoes on credit,

he pays triple the price.

If a rich guy buys a bank, he pays peanuts.

That's how our country works.

But it is our country.

I won't emigrate to Argentina, Brazil or anywhere else.

This is where I'm from.

Pablo's archives

are a fragile treasure, but an extraordinary one.

They are the witnesses of a page of Chilean history.

They maintain intact and visible

the thousands of faces of the popular resistance.

Thanks to Pablo's work,

it is impossible to erase history

and to claim that the past didn't happen.

Today, throughout Chile,

there are many young filmmakers who film everywhere.

Together, they write the memory of the future.

When I arrived in Chile, this time,

I was very keen to explore the Cordillera.

But I soon realized

that the Cordillera was hiding something from me.

There is something behind the rocks.

Perhaps it is the echoes of the coup d'Etat.

This evokes

a very personal feeling.

I've never spoken of the loneliness that has stayed with me

since that 11th of September, 1973.

It is like a hidden anxiety,

as if, beneath my feet,

something had collapsed,

like during an earthquake.

It has been 46 years since I left my country.

During that time,

I have made twenty films about Chile.

I have lived longer abroad than in my country.

I have got used to making films from a distance.

But I never stopped feeling alone,

working in isolation, in the midst of everyday life.

In my soul,

the smoke never cleared from the ashes of my destroyed home.

I would like, if it were possible,

to reconstruct it, and to begin again.

I found small fragments of the universe in the Cordillera.

They are preserved in Chilean museums.

They are meteorites,

stones that fall from the sky.

They are small pieces of planets,

that come from very far away.

My mother taught me

that each time a meteorite falls, in the middle of the night,

you can make a wish

which comes true

if you keep it secret.

But I want to say it out loud.

My wish is that Chile recovers its childhood and its joy.