The timing of My Imaginary Country can feel momentous. This September, exactly 50 years will have passed since the leftwing Chilean government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the country’s military with backing from the CIA. An abyssal dictatorship followed. The tumult ahead of the coup was captured by Patricio Guzmán in his landmark documentary The Battle of Chile. Having spent much of a lifetime in exile, the director now releases My Imaginary Country, recording his return to the country as it undergoes another convulsion: the 2019 estallido social (“social outburst”) of mass protests against inequality and political stasis. The result is at once vivid, kinetic, hope-filled and haunted.
And this battle is literal. In Santiago, the police fire rubber bullets; paving stones are broken up and hurled back. But if Guzmán admires the young protesters, he never revels in the violence. (He does admit a nightmare déjà vu at soldiers returned to Chilean streets.) Instead, something less achievable in the filmmaking of 1973 becomes an epic motif. Extraordinary drone shots capture the sheer number of people involved in the estallido, city avenues turned to rivers of humanity. And an elegant, unfussy structure makes room for the micro alongside the macro. Interviews with activists detail raw economic grievance over meagre pensions and the cost of education; the particular anger of Chilean women; most of all, the psychic shadow cast by a national constitution dating back to General Pinochet.
But timing can also be doubled-edged for any film bound up with the news cycle. Since the film was shot, Chile has indeed half-transformed, with a new leftwing president in Gabriel Boric. That hated constitution is now meant to be on borrowed time. And yet its dismantling is already mired in political uncertainty. Still: besides his grandstand aerial camera, Guzmán also dots the film with eloquent photography. A hint, perhaps, at how My Imaginary Country should best be understood. It is a frozen image of a point in time; a graceful snapshot of change in motion.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from June 9
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