A los pueblos del mundo
A record of Pinochet's crimes, one of few Chilean exile films made in the US.
21'
United States
IFFR 2024
“The armed forces of Chile, trained in the United States, write a black page of our history with the blood of the workers. In the name of big business, they fulfil their counter-revolutionary duty against the working class in all of Latin America. […] They want to stop a history moving with full force against them, because the workers of Chile stand united and full of courage. […] In this film we'll show how Imperialism in the 1920s started the first counter-revolution against the workers movement of Chile. Events and people of today are recognisable easily in these distorting mirror images of the past.”
Thus commences one of the first ever feature-length Chilean exile documentaries. Die Fäuste vor der Kanone remembers the desperate origins of Chile's labour movement around the turn of the century. Especially the period called Patagonia Rebelde when several strikes in saltpetre mines were ruthlessly quelled. Witnesses remember while newspapers and photographs of the day show how eagerly the bourgeoisie collaborated with the owning class. There is a lot to be learned from this history and Ancelovici and Lübbert make sure the audience correctly understands these lessons.
– Olaf Möller
Orlando Lübbert, Gastón Ancelovici
IFFR 2024
Programme IFFR 2024
After the coup against the democratically elected government of Chile and the murder of the nation’s president, Salvador Allende, on September 11th 1973, masses of Chileans fled the country for unknown futures far away. In 1974, spearheaded by works like Sergio Castilla’s Pinochet: fascista, asesino, traidor, agente del imperialismo and Raúl Ruiz’s Dialogue d’exilés, a historically unique phenomenon started to take shape: a Chilean cinema in exile. The vast majority of Chile’s film culture had left and were now living spread across different nations, this included already established auteurs like Patricio Guzmán (The Battle Of Chile (Part 1): The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie), Miguel Littin (Actas de Marusia) and Helvio Soto (La triple muerte del tercer personaje) as well as film students like Sebastián Alarcón (Night Over Chile), Leo Mendoza (Reír o no reír) or Luis Mora (Night of the Captain). Remarkably enough, the resulting production forms a coherent whole: it continues the Chilean cinema of the Unidad Popular, and protests against the fascism at home – while often presenting Chile as but an example for the forms of oppression and terrorism found all over the world. In an age where ever more filmmakers are forced into exile and whole communities are violently displaced, IFFR presents a grand overview of the phenomenon on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. We’ll present some twenty-five features and shorts covering the first decade of production in exile, mixing established classics with shorts and television works hardly seen since their original presentation.
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Read more about this programmeA record of Pinochet's crimes, one of few Chilean exile films made in the US.
21'
United States
IFFR 2024
A film about Chile then and now, looking at the 1925 strike of saltpetre miners.
110'
Mexico
IFFR 2024
Antonio Skármeta’s fiction feature debut about Pablo Neruda and his postman, set in Chile.
80'
West Germany
IFFR 2024