A Starry Diaspora
Nostalgia for the Light 2010. 90 minutes. Chile. Directed by Patricio Guzmán. Watchdate: 5/19/2011 Patricio Guzmán explores the mysteries of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, where astronomers can get a better view of the stars than anywhere else, where the bereaved search for the preserved bodies of Pinochet's victims in the shifting sands, where inscriptions survive from Pre-Colombian indigenes. In a brief but profoundly thoughtful documentary, Guzmán allows the cosmological and the political, the anthropological and the astronomical to intermingle and cross-pollinate rather than being artificially walled off from one another by different academic departments or different specialty television networks. A elegy for Chile's painful past but also searching meditation on the nature of time, memory and truth, Guzmán asks us to reconsider what is meant by the term 'history.' I couldn't be more encouraged to watch a documentary that so eloquently ...