Chilean director Patricio Guzmán to attend Rice Cinema for three films in retrospective series

PATRICIO GUZMÁN

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Rice Cinema will present six films by noted Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán Nov. 10-19. Guzmán will attend three screenings during the first weekend of the retrospective series and will discuss the films with audience members.

The series is open to the public and will be shown at Rice Cinema.

The first film, “The Southern Cross,” is a historical documentary about the religious conquest of Latin America and how Catholicism has evolved in the region. It will be shown Nov. 10 at 7 p.m.

Guzmán’s “Robinson Crusoe Island/My Jules Verne” will screen at 7 p.m. Nov. 11. It depicts the director’s personal quest to find the island on which Daniel Defoe’s 18th-century sailor was shipwrecked. Guzmán also includes frequent references to the 19th-century French writer Jules Verne, whose fantastic novels influenced him as a child.

The third film, “Nostalgia for the Light,” is a poetic documentary about Chile’s Atacama Desert. Astronomers are drawn to the Atacama, one of the driest places on Earth, but it was also used as a dumping ground for opponents’ bodies during the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. “Nostalgia for the Light” is a film about the universe, man’s place in it, history and memory. It begins at 7 p.m. Nov. 12.

The following weekend, “Madrid,” a short, personal look at the Spanish capital, is paired with “Chile Obstinate Memory.” Screening will begin at 7 p.m. Nov. 18. In the second film, the director returns to his native country with a copy of his award-winning trilogy, “The Battle of Chile,” and discovers the strange relation his nation has to history under a dictatorship.

The final film, “Salvador Allende,” returns to the topic Guzmán is most associated with: politics. It addresses the myths and the facts of the ousted president’s tenure and attempts to see the events of Allende’s life and death with a clear, uncompromised eye. It will screen at 7 p.m. Nov. 19.

All films will be shown in Spanish with English subtitles.

General admission tickets cost $11; tickets for students and senior citizens cost $9.

To purchase tickets in advance, visit http://cinemartsociety.org/events/.

For more on the films, go to http://ricecinema.rice.edu/Events.aspx.