On September 15 we said goodbye to Patricio Guzmán, the Chilean filmmaker and documentarian whose work, over more than five decades, invited us to look at our country through memory, history and the territories we inhabit.
Internationally acclaimed for films such as The Battle of Chile, Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button and The Cordillera of Dreams, Guzmán built a body of work in which landscape was never just landscape. In his documentaries, nature, memory and human experience come together to reveal stories that lie beneath the surface. His career was recognized in Chile with the National Prize for Performing and Audiovisual Arts in 2023.
En The Cordillera of DreamsIn "The Cordillera of Dreams", Guzmán turns his gaze to the Andes. The mountain range appears as an immense, ancient and majestic presence, but also as a territory laden with memory. The mountains stop being a backdrop and become protagonists: they are memory, time, matter and witnesses to history.
This way of looking at the mountains resonates with one of the ideas we seek to highlight at the Southern Andes Natural Laboratory: a mountain is much more than a landscape.
Mountains hold the waters that sustain our territories, ecosystems that are home to unique species, communities and cultures that have built their own ways of living there, and a geological history that stretches far beyond our own existence.
Looking at a mountain, then, can mean looking at millions of years of Earth's history. It can also mean asking about the memories it holds, the people who live there and the changes we are causing.
This is perhaps one of the great contributions of Guzmán's vision: teaching us that a territory can hold many stories at once, and that behind a seemingly still landscape lie layers of time, matter, memory and life.
From the mountains of southern Chile, we recognize and thank Patricio Guzmán for his contribution to culture and documentary film, and especially for his ability to show us our land in a different way, through his curiosity, sensitivity and memory.
His work remains an invitation to look more deeply.
And perhaps today, facing the mountains, we too can pause to think of them as Guzmán taught us: not only as what we see, but as what they hold, remember and tell us.
For those who would like to explore this perspective, The Cordillera of Dreams is available to watch online on OndaMedia.
