In memory of Patricio Guzmán (1941–2026)

The first time I saw La Batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile), it felt like a missing piece of the puzzle of my own life. The trilogy told me a part of Chilean history that I hadn’t experienced myself, but that had shaped the course of my life. I saw people fighting for a new society and for their ideals, and the military violently overthrowing a democratically elected government. Through these films, I began to understand the Chile my parents had lived through in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Years later, during a period when the IDFA Bertha Fund was supporting documentary festivals and initiatives around the world, one phrase surfaced again and again in applications from Latin America, Africa, and Asia: “A country without documentary cinema is like a family without a photo album.” It was a quote by Patricio Guzmán that came up whenever he spoke about documentary film and his work.

I met filmmakers from Syria, Myanmar, Senegal, Ukraine, and many other countries, and as soon as Chile came up in conversation, they mentioned Patricio Guzmán. They saw themselves in his films; they recognized their own countries in his work. Above all, his work inspired them to make their films and tell their own stories.

His final trilogy—Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light), El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button), and La cordillera de los sueños (The Cordillera of Dreams)—is evocative and painfully beautiful in the way it connects the suffering under the military regime with the striking Chilean landscape. The history of a nation becomes a universal, existential pain, that is as fundamental as our relationship with the stars, water, deserts, and mountains.

With Guzmán’s passing, we have lost a great filmmaker who leaves behind not only an impressive body of work, but also a tireless commitment to fighting against oblivion and preserving historical memory—a struggle that extends far beyond Chile.

Isabel Arrate Fernandez
Artistic Director IDFA