Salvador Allende

Belgium, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico

2004

104 Min

Color, Black and White

1.85:1

French, Spanish, English

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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DP Patricio Guzmán, Julia Muñoz

MUSIC Jorge Arriagada

Cannes (Out of Competition), San Sebastián (Zabaltegi), Toronto, Locarno (Retrospective)

Synopsis

One from the heart, Salvador Allende is the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s plaintive look back at the rise and violent fall of the world’s first democratically elected Marxist president. Mr. Guzmán, who went into exile after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that led to Allende’s death, has returned to the country of his birth with a camera in hand and a storehouse of passionate memories. Alas, little of that passion informs the filmmaking in this documentary dirge, a memento mori about “the other Sept. 11” that’s drenched in revolutionary tears but lacking much in the way of historical and political insight. –Trigon FIlm

Director

Patricio Guzmán

Patricio Guzmán is born in 1941 in Santiago, Chile. He attends the Official Cinematography School in Madrid, where he dedicates his studies to documentary film. His films are regularly selected and awarded prizes at international festivals. In 1973 he films “The Battle of Chile”, a 5-hour documentary on the end of Allende’s government. The magazine CINEASTE nominates it as “one of the ten best political films in the world”. After the military coup, Guzmán is threatened to be executed and spends two weeks arrested inside the national stadium, unable to communicate his whereabouts to anyone. He leaves the country in November 1973. He lives in Cuba, Spain and then France, where he makes “In the Name of God” (Grand Prize, Festival of Popoli, 1987), “The Southern Cross” (Grand Prize, Festival Vue Sur les Docs, Marseille, 1992), “Chile, Obstinate Memory” (Grand Prize Festival of Tel Aviv, 1999), “The Pinochet Case” (International Critic’s Week, Cannes, 2002), and “Salvador Allende” (Official… read more