Critic Reviews

The Cordillera of Dreams is a beautiful film about nightmares that have yet to end.

For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.

The Cordillera of Dreams is a stirring look at a nation still recovering from the brutalisation meted out by General Pinochet’s callous and paranoid actions, but Guzmán goes further to offer his opinion of the present issues facing the country, specifically neoliberalism’s assault on land, resources and people.

In and of itself, it is a mournfully intelligent, poetic documentary that once more seeks to link the vastness, grandeur and indifference of nature with the human horrors that Chileans have lived through. The search for meaning is so personal here (Guzman narrates most of the film in the first person) and so difficult that it is often heart-rending.

Taken as a completed project, Guzmán’s late-career trinity is a stunning achievement in the cinema of the hidden pattern and the startling, unexpected connection.

Contemplative, analytical and troubling, this is a nature film refracted through a historical trauma, a compilation of visual wonders that doubles as an act of remembrance.

This is rich and valuable testament to Chilean courage.

Guzmán wistfully laments his long absence from his homeland and the circumstances that led him to flee, imbuing his reflections with a tangible sense of mourning.

It’s a highly personal documentary: in addition to focusing on the mountains, Guzmán revisits his childhood home, now derelict, and explores his own archive footage of the 1973 coup d’état that prompted his relocation to France.