Upon his return to Chile from self-imposed exile, Pablo Perelman gave searing narrative form to the haunting limbo of Chile’s desaparecidos in this clandestinely made film inspired by the kidnapping, torture and assassination of his own brother by Pinochet’s forces. Completed in 1987 but banned until the end of the dictatorship in 1990, Latent Image also draws powerfully from actual interviews conducted by Perelman with victims of torture in Villa Grimaldi, the notorious detention center operated by Pinochet’s secret police that exerts an ominous presence in the film. The story of a commercial photographer searching both for his lost brother and for an authentic form of image able to capture the grave truth of human rights crimes, carries a heavy metaphoric weight as a statement about the power and responsibility of cinematic memory.