The Vancouver International Film Festival presents:
The Pearl Button
Dir. Patricio Guzmán (Chile), 2015. 82 min.
Van City Theatre
Friday April 29, 2016, 5pm
Saturday April 30, 2016, 7:45pm
Sunday May 1, 2016, 4:30pm
Tuesday May 3, 2016, 6:30pm
Thursday May 5, 2016, 6:30pm
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One of the most respected and admired documentary filmmakers in the world, Patricio Guzmán explores the Patagonian Archipelago and its meaning in Chilean history—from its use by Chile’s Indigenous peoples to its function as a grave site for Pinochet’s desaparecidos—in this visually stunning follow-up to 2010’s masterly Nostalgia for the Light.
Rightfully earning the film “Best Script” at the Berlinale (the rarest of awards for a documentary), Guzmán’s eloquent, entrancing narration familiarizes us with the film’s remarkable setting while drawing connections and dispensing heady concepts. With its mountains, glaciers and volcanoes, the world’s largest archipelago is practically supernatural in appearance. And bordering it is the water which contains vast reserves of memories and can give voice to the past with just the slightest coercion. Consequently, while immaculate images of ice floes and waterfalls, nebulae and quartz captivate us, it’s Guzmán’s accounts of this region’s chequered history, of native tribes tragically decimated by colonists, of political prisoners disposed of in the sea, that are the most arresting.
“Applying the same mix of lyrical nature and space imagery, voice-over narration, archive photos and footage and interviews [as in Nostalgia for the Light], the director crafts another deeply poetic but also committedly, at times even angrily, humanist meditation on buried traces of the past and how they determine our present and future as a race and as a civil society… Tools associated with fiction are used to tell the truth, and an elegant tone is deployed to disguise a righteous fury.” Lee Marshall, Screen
“By turns lyrical, impressionistic and profound.” Gary Goldstein, LA Times
“Guzmán’s gorgeous documentary The Pearl Button is in a class with the other beauty-of-nature reveries like Koyannisqatsi and Baraka, but with its political overtones delivered via somber narration.” Sherilyn Connelly, SF Weekly
In Spanish with English subtitles.