Critic Reviews

The Pearl Button is a vivid, essential portal to understanding not only the heritage of a nation, but also the art of nonfiction cinema.

By turns lyrical, impressionistic and profound, the documentary The Pearl Button requires patience but offers stirring rewards.

This haunting Chilean documentary is more poetry than journalism as filmmaker Patricio Guzman compares the fate of the indigenous people of Patagonia with that of the disappeared of the Pinochet regime.

Guzmán's essential thesis seems to be that, in turning its back on the ocean, modern Chile lost a crucial part of its identity. But he also puts forward the extraordinary idea that the water has a memory, and that if you listen closely enough, you can hear the voices of the disappeared.

It is the director’s extraordinary intuition about the synchronicity of history, geography and the physical universe – a mysterious relationship that has nothing to do with cause and effect – that gives the film and its predecessor their undeniable power.

Tools associated with fiction are used to tell the truth, and an elegant tone is deployed to disguise a righteous fury.

A master of voice-over and metaphor (the title alone has an amazing payoff), [Mr. Guzmán] sifts through essential truths and draws links between Chile’s past and present inhabitants.

As often happens in Guzmán’s films, The Pearl Button keeps returning to the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-90, during which thousands of Chileans were “disappeared,” taken away and never seen again alive.

A haunting mediation on water replacing its predecessor’s preoccupation with stars and dirt.

Inhabiting the space between fact and fiction, where repressed memories often seek refuge, The Pearl Button weaves a fascinating, yet traumatic route through Chile's recent history.