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¡Viva Chile Mierda!

¡Viva Chile Mierda! is a feature length documentary that investigates the enduring effects of torture and exile on a Chilean family. I interviewed Gabriela Cordova who was tortured in 1974 and one of the guards at her torture facility. The film explores how exile transforms cultural belonging while also locating this family story within a broader history of U.S. imperialism in Latin America.

My research addresses three themes: the political weight of representing the past; the intersections of political violence and quotidian life; and the reconstruction of Chilean national identity in a postdictatorship era. It aims to produce new modes of representing this difficult history: the research context includes Sorensen (2009) on memory and human rights in contemporary Chilean media, as well as Guzmán’s documentaries on Chilean political memory. I use Rosen’s (2001) account of cinema’s inherent historicity to reconfigure documentary’s staging of pastness. Instead of providing ‘evidence’ through historical footage, the film uses drawings to represent the past. This technique formally evokes missing documents, as fleeing exiles were unable to bring family photographs and political violence went deliberately undocumented. Just as the film’s subjects were ‘disappeared,’ so were the visual records of their lives. Hand-drawing replaces mechanical reproduction to figure lost memories. By combining visibly subjective memory with the direct testimony of witnesses, I aim to synthesise cinematic issues of historical representation with the history of political violence in Chile. I juxtapose the media spectacle of the 2010 rescue of Chilean miners from deep below ground with the excavation of traumatic memories by both exiles and their torturers in order to question the post-dictatorship formation of Chilean national identity. Investigating these criss-crossing lives, the project argues that modern Chilean identity is affected by the histories of torture in more complex and ambiguous ways than we might expect.

The feature-length documentary, ¡Viva Chile Mierda! is eighty seven minutes long and involved a two-year-long production/research process. It was shot in three countries and makes a complex historical argument about the enduring effects of political violence, disappearance, and exile of Chileans affected by the Pinochet regime. It demanded time-consuming research work, including tracking down a key interview subject, who, until recently, was under the police protection of the French government and who was difficult to contact. The film includes many other interviews and uses extensive primary sources archival material – itself needing to be traced frame by frame and animated.