THE PEARL BUTTON: A gem by Patricio Guzmán @ Calder Bookshop

THE PEARL BUTTON | EL BOTÓN DE NÁCAR
Dir. Patricio Guzmán | 2015 | Chile, France | 82 min.

The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people and their tragic history, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film gives it a voice. Using both archival images and gorgeous new footage, THE PEARL BUTTON manages to convey different periods of history and geography in a gripping tale of our modern world.

Master director Patricio Guzmán (b. 1941) has documented the tumultuous political history of his native Chile for over fifty years. From the democratically elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende in the early seventies to the US-backed coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, and more recently to the social uprising that opened the door for the rewriting of a new constitution, Guzmán has served as a witness and chronicler of the history of the South American nation. His commitment to filming the lived history of his country for more than 50 years is unprecedented in world cinema. Among his better-known productions, we find the trilogy THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-1979) and more recently another trilogy: NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (2010), THE PEARL BUTTON (2015) and THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS (2019).

[The ticket includes a welcome glass of wine, kindly offered by the Chilean Embassy in London]