Beautiful, interesting, incredible cinema.

See what’s playing

Critics reviews

THE PEARL BUTTON

Patricio Guzmán France, 2015
Conquest of indigenous people is Chile's original sin and one cannot approach the country's history without addressing the invasions, wars, and massacres that shaped the Spanish colony and then independent nation. The film takes its time introducing the genocide of the maritime Selk'nam people, and even longer for Pinochet's regime. By the end of his introductory meditations, however, water, ancient indigenous history, and language seem necessary to fully comprehend these tragedies.
December 22, 2016
Read full article
The film is filled with breathtaking footage of the water, ice and islands of Patagonia, but in one remarkable scene Guzman asks an artist to create a giant map, a room-sized paper cutout of Chile, because he has never actually seen his country in one piece: There is no room for a land this long on the classroom wall.
April 8, 2016
Guzmán finds new methods of excavation and new ways in which to combine found materials, the manifest metaphor—the dialogue within and between in his films—ultimately exemplifying that when correlations are causations, in time's current and Guzman's body of work, nothing ever really ends.
April 6, 2016
Guzmán's calm voiceover often provides a lyrical compliment to the potent imagery. Early in the film he remembers hearing raindrops on a zinc roof while visiting the area many decades before as a child. "That sound has followed me my entire life," he says. The past cannot be shaken, only re-examined and restored with hopes of better understanding what lies beneath.
March 18, 2016
As with Nostalgia for the Light, the film is contemplative poetry, in which these images meld with Guzmán's lyrical commentary to provide both a personal and political journey across his nation's history and psyche.
March 4, 2016
Turning his attention from the northern desert landscape he explored so vividly in 'Nostalgia for the Light' to the remote archipelagos of Western Patagonia, the veteran Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán offers another dazzling poetic meditation on history, ethnography, culture and political violence in 'The Pearl Button'.
March 4, 2016
Driven by an almost childlike curiosity and a very serious need to continue uncovering the half-buried secrets of dictatorship, Guzmán combines science, metaphor and narrative ingenuity to create a kind of metaphysical history lesson about the relationship between water, the cosmos and political turmoil in Chile. A film of wonder and dread, where the ‘language of water' helps us better understand of the language of impunity, The Pearl Button is a contemplative stunner.
January 18, 2016
There's an undeniable tinge of kitsch in this film's visual beauty and poetic language that wasn't evident in the far tauter Nostalgia for the Light—but, taken as part of a diptych, The Pearl Button has no shortage of documentary force or of imaginative seriousness. Dealing with horrors of this intensity and scale, Guzmán can be forgiven a slight penchant for the galactically vaporous.
October 23, 2015
It's one of those works that in its overflowing, abundant generosity, its overwhelming intelligence and desire to share, to tell, to make connections, ends up trying to do a little too much. A new film from Guzmán is always a gift, so this is barely a complaint. At eighty-two minutes it does many things well, not least providing yet another window into the unexpected intersections at play in the mind of one our greatest living filmmakers.
October 23, 2015
For most of its 80-minute length, "The Pearl Button" meditates lyrically on water and its effects on humankind. Then it makes a sharp turn into evoking the horrors of the Pinochet regime, a transition that feels awkward and rather forced, diluting the film's ultimate impact.
October 23, 2015
[Its] dramatizations make The Pearl Button a less delicately mournful, and more plainly confrontational, experience than the more breathtaking Nostalgia, but the new film is undeniably an achievement of its own. Guzmán's last two features—in which his camera becomes a sort of satellite, gracefully suspended in the firmament while surveying a particular patch of earth down below—have launched him into the stratosphere of the great moving-image essayists.
October 22, 2015
The Pearl Button charts a winding course from a poetic-essayistic disquisition on the origins and power of water, to anthropological consideration of the ancient Patagonian cultures of southwestern Chile, to folklorist archival storytelling, to first-person oral history, then to a shockingly apt consideration of Pinochet's genocidal policies, including an absolute gut-punch of a re-enactment sequence.
October 22, 2015