Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Full transcript coming soon.

In order to return once more to the troubled history of the Pinochet dictatorship, Guzmán’s latest film travels to Chile’s remote Atacama Desert whose unusual conditions give the world’s largest telescopes privileged access to the stars and their cosmic secrets. One of the driest places on the planet the Atacama also, however, preserves almost anything buried in its sand- including ancient indigenous remains and, more recently, the fragments of victims’ bodies scattered there by Pinochet’s death squads. A work of rare poetry and emotional power, Nostalgia for the Light carefully interweaves the profoundly insightful musings of astonomers and archaelogists who have made the desert their home with the testimony of a resolute group of widows who wander the desert, fueled by the hope of finding even a fragment of an executed loved one’s remains. In this place where the past - be it the ancient world, the historic past or the unfathomable distance of the galaxies - all seem incredibly alive and close, Guzmán crafts a brilliant meditation on the strange tenacity and paradoxical fragility of memory and history. – HG