Chilean master documentarian Patricio Guzmán has been nominated for France’s César Award in the Best Documentary category for his most recent film The Cordillera of Dreams / La cordillera de los sueños, which completes his landscape and memory trilogy along with Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015).
The Cordillera of Dreams centers on the imposing landscape of the Andes, which run the length of the South American country’s eastern border. At once protective and isolating, magisterial and indifferent, the cordillera of mountains serves as an enigmatic focal point around which Guzmán contemplates the enduring legacy of the 1973 military coup d’état.
Looking at both the past and future, the filmmaker considers how the neoliberal policies introduced under the Pinochet regime have continued to stratify Chilean society. The cordillera is not merely landscape or a metaphorical divide, as it contains much of the country’s natural resources—wealth that is privately owned and inaccessible to the vast majority of Chileans.
The film will have a North American theatrical release starting February 12 and its release coincides with a new era of political upheaval in Chile, one marked by massive street protests and a demand for a new constitution to replace the current one, which was written under the Pinochet regime. Unflinching in its presentation of contemporary Chile, The Cordillera of Dreams looks towards the possibilities of political change by drawing a line between the ideological struggles of the past and the inequalities of the present.
This marks Guzmán’s second César Award nomination after The Pearl Button in 2016. The winners of the 45th Annual César Awards will be announced at a ceremony in Paris on February 28, 2020.
