When left-wing coalition leader Gabriel Borek was elected Chile’s prime minister in 2021, he was 35 years old. When, a few months later, he was sworn in as the country’s youngest president – also the world’s youngest head of state – Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán was 80 years old. Protest movements contributed to the rise of Borek. And though it is more formally a standard document based on press reporting than any of his later articles, it is also one of the rarest of projects: a project in which a distinguished member of an older generation of political activists expresses deep admiration for his young age. Peers are deeply optimistic and grateful for the future they are building.
It begins – in the personal record that fans of the recent Guzmán movie are accustomed to – with bricks. The filmmaker in his warm, melodic Spanish version of ASMR recounts how such bricks and stones were pulled from the sidewalks of Santiago (as they were in France during the May 68 disturbances) for use by civilian protesters as defensive weapons against tear gas and police rubber bullets. It also reminds him of the quickly and brutally suppressed turmoil that followed Pinochet’s 1973 seizure of power. The rise of that junta forced Guzmán to live in exile from which he never returned, preferring instead to visit and revisit the subject of his country’s history from the perspective of a grieving expatriate home forever.
But it also means that Guzmán did not witness the massive and improvised civic mobilization that occurred in 2019 as a reaction against rising inequality, high cost of living, political corruption and nepotism in contemporary Chilean society. Chris Marker, one of Guzmán’s early protagonists, once told him, “When you want to shoot a fire, you have to be where the first flame will appear.” When Guzmán apologetically admits that this time, he wasn’t there at the moment the can exploded, it’s almost as if he’s admitting to a dereliction of duty.
Perhaps that’s why the director largely removes himself from the narrative, rather than using contemporary reporting, including some stunning drone photos of winding columns of up to 1.2 million people, and his interviews with key witnesses, to tell the story. His earlier films have shed light on philosophical inquiry into his relationship to his country—not just Chile’s politics but its skies and deserts (“Nostalgia for the Light”), its coastline and waters (“the pearl button”) and the length of the Andes. Spine (“Cordillera of dreams”). Here his focus turns to the leaders of this new revolution. Which is easier said than done, given that one of the things that sets the so-called “social explosion” apart from other civil protest movements is that, as Guzmán notes with undisguised admiration, it was a “leadersless” movement.
It would perhaps be more correct to say that the journalists, writers, civilian first responders, photographers, scientists, and students whom Guzmán interviewed were representatives of the mobilized citizens, not its directors. In any case, they are an inspiring choice: not coincidentally, they are all women. There is a student who was one of a group of schoolchildren whose spontaneous and bottomless refusal to pay the recently raised subway fare in 2019 sparked protests across the country. One photographer was partially blinded in clashes with police – one of hundreds who had severe eye trauma as a result of overzealous crowd dispersal tactics made covering one eye the most symbolic gesture of the movement.
One commentator talks about leaving her daughter every morning, knowing full well that she would have risked leaving her motherless in the evening; Another ponders eloquently at a strange, sudden flash of sympathy for one of the female riot police officers on the other side of the barricades. In all cases, the choice of spokesmen indistinctly suggests that, in so far as the unrest arose out of economic frustrations, those frustrations were indivisible from the patriarchal status quo whose most committed opposition came from women of all social and moral backgrounds.
Guzmán is not so naive that he points out that they were all cheerful, cheerful songs. There were looting and quarrels, and perhaps the inevitable lulls of such a long campaign. But with the election of Borek, he has the opportunity to positively direct his film and he takes it. Aside from everything else, “My Fantasy Country” is valuable even for daring to suggest that winning for genuine progressive democratic values is still possible when recent developments in other parts of the world have made it seem so elusive.
Neither does the film achieve the heights of poetic depth of Guzmán’s “Chile Trilogy” mentioned above, nor is it as urgent and vivid a work of historiography as his classic 1975 book The Battle of Chile. However, as he contemplates seeing military vehicles throng the streets and squares of Santiago for the second time In his life – this time towards a very different outcome – there is relief in the suggestion that Guzmán’s imagination, though tentative, has become somewhat real. It is a justification, not only for the nation, but for its most straightforward and honest historian. Wish all countries were so fortunate to have Patricio Guzmán, to aid in the agonizing process of recovering what has been lost, as with My My Imaginary Country, to occasionally celebrate what has been achieved.
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