Veteran filmmaker Patricio Guzmán was announced today as the 2023 recipient of Chile’s National Arts Prize in the Audiovisual and Representation category. The jury “unanimously resolved to award the 2023 National Award for Representation and Audiovisual Arts to the filmmaker, screenwriter, researcher, producer, film theorist and teacher Patricio Guzmán Lozanes," wrote Chile’s Ministry of Culture in its X account.
“His audiovisual work has an essential commitment to social justice, and very profoundly to truth and memory. He is an author whose personal gaze summons all of us, and makes him a recognized filmmaker throughout the world. What he has done feeds our intelligence. His vision unites us and makes us great as a country" added the Ministry.
Born in 1941 in Santiago, Guzmán has dedicated his career to documentary cinema. His films have screened widely and received international recognition. Guzmán studied at the Official School of Cinematographic Art in Madrid. From 1972 to 1979, he directed The Battle of Chile: Part I-III, a five-hour trilogy about Salvador Allende’s government and its fall to General Pinochet in a bloody military coup. Named one of the 10 best political films in the world by Cineaste, one of the greatest documentaries ever made by Time Out and Sight and Sound, and more recently, one of the most significant political films of all time by The New Republic, The Battle of Chile is the foundation of Guzmán's cinema.
After Pinochet took power, Patricio Guzmán was arrested and imprisoned at the National Stadium, where he was subjected repeatedly to simulated executions. In 1973, he left Chile and moved to Cuba, then Spain, and then France, but remained very attached to his country and its history. Guzmán is the president of the International Documentary Festival in Santiago, Chile (FIDOCS), which he founded in 1997.
In 2010 he premiered his documentary Nostalgia for the Light, the first in trilogy of Chilean landscape and memory, along with The Pearl Button and The Cordillera of Dreams. His most recent film is the 2022 documentary My Imaginary Country, which is a chronicle of how a 2019 popular uprising in Chile sparked political change in the South American nation.
The announcement of the National Arts Prize to Guzmán was made few days before the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile. To mark the occasion Icarus Films and Cinema Tropical are presenting the special retrospective series “Patricio Guzmán, Dreaming of Utopia: 50 Years of Revolutionary Hope and Memory," a New York City-wide event celebrating the award-winning filmmaker's longtime commitment to documenting Chile's history.
This unprecedented retrospective series, taking place in three NYC cinemas simultaneously, begins September 8 and includes nine films by Guzmán, along with special conversations and guest speakers. The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) will host the theatrical run of a new restoration of The Battle of Chile, whil Anthology Film Archives will premiere his first feature-length film from 1972, The First Year, also in a new restoration, and screen Salvador Allende (2004). The IFC Center will host screenings of Guzman’s four most recent films: Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button, The Cordillera of Dreams, and last year’s My Imaginary Country.
