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Patricio Guzmán’s three-part The Battle of Chile is not only the definitive visual history of the coup that overthrew Chile’s elected president, Salvador Allende, in 1973 and installed the dictator Augusto Pinochet (though, as Pauline Kael once pointed out, the “facts” presented are open to debate), but one of the greatest documentary films of all time if only because of its dogged dedication to telling the tale chronologically and from an intimate perspective. Three generations after that film was completed in 1978, he now presents My Imaginary Country, a more concise, less diligent overview of the people’s protests that broke out in October 2019, initially as a reaction to a steep subway fare increase, and soon consumed the country. Guzmán was not on site in 2019, and didn’t arrive to record the ensuing street unrest until the following year, but he manages to cover what he missed with available footage, most of which is very harrowing for the violence that the police, bolstered by the military, inflicted on the protesters. Though Guzmán talks about the Allende coup in passing all through My Imaginary Country and forges a connection between the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship and the uprising in Santiago, he focuses on the front lines, interviewing dozens of people who were involved, as well as intellectuals who had a stake in the protests, especially afterwards, when the people actually won the right to refigure Chile’s constitution and install a democracy that, so far, at least, is the first one since Allende’s election that has supplanted the sclerotic political guard. What’s intriguing about Guzmán’s approach is that he only interviews women, because, in the end, the protests were against “exploitation and oppression” by men, and women were the first and foremost victims of that oppression. 

And whereas The Battle of Chile was a Marxist document, My Imaginary Country eschews dialectics for a discussion of resistance as common cause. “We just wanted basic living standards,” says one young woman who lived on the street with her husband and children before and during the protests. “I was fighting for the Chile I wanted to live in,” says another. One statistic stands out: 73 percent of the children born in Chile are out of wedlock, meaning that women cannot work and raise children at the same time, and thus one of the conditions that they were fighting for was a childcare system that addressed their reality. But while the protests were often violent, the credo that emerged was “creative resistance,” which incorporated methods that would not only unite the protesters but symbolize their feelings in vivid but easy-to-comprehend ways. A group of poets came up with a song that the women chanted during the protests and whose chorus declared, “The rapist is you,” as they pointed in unison toward the police who were representing all the men who keep them under foot. One journalist made a clear distinction of this strategy: “Making love is a human right,” meaning that women were denied this right by men who demanded submission. In order for Chilean women to reclaim their humanity they needed to own their sexual agency before anything else. 

As Guzmán shows, the economic stagnation and political paralysis that had gripped Chile for decades and prevented even the middle class from earning a living wage was a hangover of the Pinochet era, which normalized the kleptocracy that kept the country depressed. The government was “extractionist” as one pundit puts it, taking from the people even when they had nothing left to give. Eventually, the authorities gave in because they were exhausted—old regimes usually are, regardless of how young their leaders are—and the people buckled down and formed a constituent assembly, headed by a Mapuche woman, in order to write a new constitution, which was followed by a free election that chose a young, socialist from the countryside to set a course in accordance with the people’s hopes and desires. Obviously, the story has just started, unlike the one told in The Battle of Chile, which recounted the coup as a done deal. Will “the country we once imagined,” meaning the country that was supposed to materialize after Allende’s election, finally become a reality after all this time? asks Guzmán. That could be the topic of his next film, if he’s still around to make it.

In Spanish. Opens Dec. 20 in Tokyo at Uplink Kichijoji (0422-66-5042), K’s Cinema Shinjuku (03-3352-2471). 

My Imaginary Country home page in Japanese

photo (c) Atacama Productions-ARTE France Cinema-Market Chile/2022/