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“They say that water has a memory. I believe it also has a voice.” - Patricio Guzmán
Patricio Guzmán used the desert sand and stars as metaphors for an investigation into Chile’s troubled past in Nostalgia for the Light. In its wondrous follow-up, he turns his lens to the ocean that lines his native country’s Patagonia coastline, home to the largest series of Archipelagos in the world. On his quest to uncover the secrets hidden below the tides, the veteran political filmmaker traces the long-erased history of the coast’s Indigenous inhabitants alongside the not-so-distant crimes committed under the Pinochet regime. Filled with breathtaking nature footage, The Pearl Button contemplates water as an agent of life, freedom, memory, justice.
In Spanish with English subtitles