Synopsis
Peliculas Escondidas – un viaje a traves del exilio y la memoria
Dokumentarfilm, 76min
After the 1973 coup d’état, Chileans émigré artists and film personnel collaborated with the East German production company DEFA in more than fifty films, material which dealt with life in exile and criticized the Latin American dictatorships. The existence of these films is unfamiliar in Latin America to this day. How can a film, made in Bulgaria, evoking the mountainous landscape of the Andes, with German and Bulgarian actors, made in a country that no longer exists, know something meaningful about repression in Latin American countries? Alejandro Areal Velez und Claudia Sandberg examine the value of this historical film material to access collective and personal memories of repression, violence and exile.The documentary is a journey through times and locations. Footage from interviewswith students, film critics, intellectuals, artists, cultural institutions and the general audienceand the urban landscapes of Berlin, Buenos Aires and Santiago that we collected over the last three years, are ways in which Areal Velez and Sandberg linkpast events to the present day.
The documentary is Claudia‘s personal quest. Born and raised in the GDR, she sawChilean DEFA films as a child. Thirty years later, she goes on a journey with stops in Berlin – Mexico – Argentina – Chile to explore if these films still have meaning in the contemporary time and for Latin American audiences. She looks for the whereabouts of the Chilean artists involved in making of the films, meets with the actors who lived in East German exile at the time, to find their own experience matching that of their protagonists.
Our documentary uses this film material as a tool to access vastly different emotions and memories linked to experiences of exile from European and Latin American perspectives. In neoliberal Chile only a few progressive cultural institutions try to raise the public profile of the subject, the DEFA filmmaterial calls for controversial reactions especially among younger Chileans as notion of the Golden Exile, which has been planted by the Pinochet regime itself, Our investigations in Argentina serve as an important case study against. In interviews with Parana Sendros and Marcela Lopez explored the role of cinema as as part of a process, especially in regards to the subject of exile. In Germany, where a screening of the film Blonder Tango brought together members of its cast and crew, the notion of exile has just become new meaning with the flood of immigrants that arrive there each day. Similarly, a film like Die Spur des Vermissten inspired Mexican students to talk about the case of the 43 students which disappeared in Sepember 2014.