Master director Patricio Guzmán travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest desert on earth for this remarkable documentary. Here, the sky is so translucent that it allows astronomers to see the boundaries of our universe. Yet the Atacama Desert climate also keeps human remains intact: pre-Columbian mummies; explorers and miners; and the remains of disappeared political prisoners. Women sift the desert soil for the bones of their loved ones, while archaeologists uncover traces of ancient civilizations and astronomers examine the most distant and oldest galaxies.
Reviews
The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“The astronomy itself continues: the study in which many of the film's interviewees hope to find a distraction or redemption. There is something Kubrickian in the way Guzmán evokes the desert's massive alienness, and the images border on the hallucinatory. It is as if Atacama is the distant planet, being watched by another astronomer on the moon. One interviewee says Chile needs an observatory that can look at its own landscape, find the missing bodies, uncover and root out all its unresolved agony. ”
12/07/2012
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The Times
Kate Muir
“Guzmán talks to astronomers and archaeologists, looking into the past light years away in the sky, and history in the ground. This is the best documentary I’ve seen this year.”
13/07/2012
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The Observer
Philip French
“This is a film to be seen, re-seen and pondered.”
15/07/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
“Astronomy, it emerges, is something of a Chilean national obsession; and Guzman examines what it means in people's lives. We meet Luis Henriquez, who found spiritual sustenance in learning astronomy while imprisoned under Pinochet. Today, young astronomer Valentina Rodriguez remembers her lost parents, abducted by the military; it's thinking about the magnitude of space, she says, that allows her to place their deaths in a perspective that keeps her sane. We then see a wall of faded, weathered pictures of the "disappeared" – themselves a constellation of distant stars, faintly glimmering out of the past.”
15/07/2012
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The New Statesman
Ryan Gilbey
“The imaginative leap between our quest for information about the universe and the hunt for answers in the dust and dirt, between celestial bodies and corporeal ones, is illuminating and elegantly made. ”
06/07/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Robey
“You can begin the film sceptical about whether Guzmán’s grand analogies, between stargazing and the archaeology of terrible human suffering, are going to come off at all. Then they do. The network of links he builds, and the film’s ever-deepening empathy for those whose search can’t be satisfied, are persuasive enough to banish doubt, leaving you humbled, shocked and moved.”
13/07/2012
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Total Film
Tom Dawson
“A film that makes you ponder the mysteries of human existence anew.”
02/07/2012
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
“Guzman subtly dovetails these different bodies of searchers into a touching essay on remembrance.”
13/07/2012
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Empire Magazine
David Parkinson
“A truly insightful art film that still manages to be easy-going and unpretentious.”
09/07/2012
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The Evening Standard
Derek Malcolm
“The film makes parallels between the astronomers who look back into the past, the better to understand the secrets of the universe, and the women who will never forget.”
13/07/2012
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“In the film’s most powerful scenes bereaved women are seen still scraping and digging for remnants of their dead. One pleads fancifully for a telescope that can look downward, scanning the earth for atrocity as the astronomers peer skywards for their telltale signs of bygone life and death. It is hard to escape the past, especially since, “the present does not exist.””
12/07/2012
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The Sunday Times
Edward Porter
“The film’s contemplation of time and memory is too poeticised, but still deeply moving.”
15/07/2012
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