Chile, Obstinate Memory

AUTHOR’S NOTE

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“In 1995 I had the urge to return to Santiago to live. During the Marseille film festival I was approached by the producer Yves Janneau who suggested something to me: “Why don’t you film your return and make an autobiographical documentary about your return?”... I thought about it for a few minutes and told him: “It’s an excellent idea, but I have another similar proposition for you: instead of filming my journey I’d like to film the search for the old characters who appear in The Battle of Chile. From this moment the film began to take shape and three months later I travelled to Santiago to do a recky accompanied by my assistant Álvaro Silva. The film was made with the amazing camera work of Eric Pittard. However I never did go back to Chile to live for ever because I felt I would never find the money to finance other films about the memory. With the passing of time I can see that my intuition was correct. Over the following 18 years I made other documentaries about the Chilean memory that were rejected, one after the other by the civil servants por los funcionarios de turno, but that were produced in France.”