Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán was awarded Spain’s Goya Award for Best Ibero-American Film this evening for his documentary feature The Cordillera of Dreams / La cordillera de los sueños, the last of his landscape and memory trilogy, which, with Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015), investigates the relationship between historical memory, political trauma and geography in his native country of Chile. This is the first time that a documentary feature wins in this category in the 36 editions of the Goya Awards.
Producer Alexandra Galvis accepted the Goya Award on behalf of Patricio Guzmán and producer Renate Sachse. She dedicated the award to the Chilean documentarian, who has documented the South American country for the over 50 years.
Winner of the L’Oeil d’or Best Documentary Award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and acclaimed at film festivals including Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Chicago and DOC NYC, 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.
