Those who survived tragedies live intimately with their aftershocks

PanARMENIAN.Net - In the splendid documentary Nostalgia for the Light, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman draws parallels between astronomers searching for stars in the world's driest desert and women searching for the remains of loved ones who were disappeared under the Pinochet regime, John Powers writes in an article he titled “The Past, Always Present In The Atacama Dark.”

“One man who has never stopped struggling is Patricio Guzman, the Chilean filmmaker who was imprisoned during the U.S.-backed coup that toppled Chile's elected president, Salvador Allende, and installed a military dictatorship that lasted the next 17 years. Guzman's documentaries have done as much as anything to keep alive the world's memory of what happened to his country that Sept. 11, 1973,” says the article posted on npr.org.

“It's been 38 years since the coup, and Guzman is now 70; though he hasn't forgotten anything, he has moved beyond horrified anger. Guzman never made a more beautiful or profound movie than his new one, Nostalgia for the Light, an exquisitely shot essay on ultimate things - time, space, memory and how creatures so small and frail as human beings find meaning in a gigantic cosmos.”

It goes on saying, “Nostalgia for the Light focuses on the Atacama Desert, a 600-mile stretch of high plateau in northern Chile that is the driest place on earth - it never rains. Composed of salt, sand and lava, the place has the bleak, ravishing beauty of a distant and forbidding planet. But because it's so high, so dry, and so far from big cities, its clear skies make it home to some of the world's great observatories.”

“Guzman's movie got me thinking about the historical traumas whose ripples still touch my own untraumatized life in Southern California - American slavery, the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the repression in Central America. For those who have survived such tragedies, or live intimately with their aftershocks, the questions are tricky and painful,” it says.