Patricio Guzmán
Patricio Guzmán Lozanes was a Chilean documentary and feature film director and screenwriter, widely regarded as the leading figure of Chilean documentary cinema and one of the most influential nonfiction filmmakers in Latin America. He is best known for the trilogy The Battle of Chile (1975–1979), an epic account of the final year of Salvador Allende's government and the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, and for a later, more essayistic trilogy linking Chile's landscape to its unresolved history: Nostalgia for the Light (2010), The Pearl Button (2015), and The Cordillera of Dreams (2019). Arrested after the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, Guzmán smuggled his film footage out of Chile and spent the following decades in exile in Cuba, Spain, and France, from where he continued to make films almost exclusively about his homeland's history and its legacy of political violence.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Read more Senses of CinemaTSPDTIMDb
Photo: FIC VIÑA, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Defining films
Critical context
Patricio Guzmán’s career in documentary film now stretches through six decades. He started out as a young man filming on the streets a political movement and the challenges it faced, lived through a coup and subsequent arrest, then went into exile to Europe. There he made less urgent films, often for French or Spanish television, while frequently returning to Chile to film more politically engaged work. More recently he made a trilogy in essay mode that linked the past and present of his home…
Films by decade
