The beauty of the Atacama Desert and its massive night sky offer the perfect visual counterpoint to Guzmán's deliberate, convincing comparison between the astronomers and the women who search the desert for the remains of the disappeared. Guzmán may draw the line between these two a little too darkly, but as a poetic essay on the study of the past, NftL offers great insight and even greater beauty.
An essential film. Guzman depicts with obstination how women who search the lost bodies of their relatives, killed under the dictatorship of Pinochet in the giant Atacama desert are doing the same as astronoms who search for stars and the origins of our world and proves that dictatorship never wins as, in this life, as it's said, nothing dies but changes and nothing is ever erased. A true masterpiece.
Poetic, if not a bit forced at times. I just wish Guzmán let the viewers work a little more to make the connections between astronomy and archaeology/excavation, instead of laying it out for us. But still, I was stunned.
An exquisite essay exploring varieties of archaeology, each tinged with twin melancholies: both of the past's irretrievability and of our inability to live anywhere but within it. Though the film ravishes, it refuses to vanish into ethereality, but grounds us in its sad, central irony: the contrast between our fascination with the depths of time and space and our reticence or refusal to honestly face the recent past.
