The screenings are part of the Harvard Film Archive Film Series EXCAVATING SUBTERRANEA. THE FILM POEMS OF ANA VAZ

Apiyemiyekî? Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/France/Portugal/Netherlands, 2019, DCP, color and b&w, 27 min. DCP source: Lightcone

Amazing Fantasy. Directed by Ana Vaz. France/Japan, 2018, DCP, color, 3 min. DCP source: Lightcone

There Is Land! (Há terra!). Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/France, 2016, DCP, color, 13 min. Portuguese with English subtitles. DCP source: Lightcone

Atomic Garden. Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/Portugal, 2018,...

In the opening shot of Ana Vaz’s feature debut, an intense blue descends upon the sprawling, modernist metropolis of Brasília, which starts spinning out of control as a symphony of wild animal sounds crescendos. It is night in America. A recognition, an alarm, an investigation, a lament…Vaz’s film sounds every one of these notes and then some, within rather subtle boundaries, such as the limited exposure and contrast range of an expired 16mm film stock, along with “day for night” shooting techniques that fabricate a permanent twilight. Through patient and attentive observation, Vaz...

Directed by Patricio Guzmán
Chile/Cuba/France, 1976, DCP, black & white, 88 min
Spanish with English subtitles
DCP source: Icarus Films

The second part of The Battle of Chile begins with the Chilean military’s first attempted coup in June 1973 and tracks the steady deterioration of Allende’s position across the months leading up to September 11. Focusing on Allende’s attempts to stave off the splintering of his party from within, The Coup d’État captures the frightening escalation of violence that began in the streets and climaxed in the fatal...

Directed by Patricio Guzmán 
Chile/Cuba/France, 1975, DCP, black & white, 96 min
Spanish with English subtitles
DCP source: Icarus FIlms

The Battle of Chile began as a boldly spontaneous attempt to comprehensively document Allende’s truly revolutionary experiment in social justice in its formative stages. Using film stock provided by Chris Marker, a thirty-one-year-old Guzmán, fresh out of film school in Madrid, led a team of cameramen into the streets of Santiago and outlying towns to capture the different sides forming staunchly for and...

Directed by Cristián Sánchez
With Felisa González, Andrés Quintana, Fernando Andía
Chile, 1979, DCP, black & white, 72 min
Spanish with English subtitles
DCP source: Cineteca Nacional de Chile

Shot clandestinely on a shoestring budget, the second feature by prolific filmmaker and theorist Cristián Sánchez bears an uncanny, yet ultimately only vague, resemblance to Taxi Driver (1976) with its story of a cabbie who spontaneously rescues a young woman from a brothel only to develop an obsessive yet platonic love for her. By keeping all violence and...

Directed by Patricio Guzmán
Chile/Cuba/France, 1978, DCP, black & white, 79 min
Spanish with English subtitles
DCP source: Icarus Films

Completed a couple of years after the first and second parts, The Power of the People offers an important coda to Guzmán’s epic documentary by turning away from the forces who opposed Allende and instead examining the loose coalition of workers and citizens who attempted to save Allende’s visionary politics. A stirring testimony to the grassroots power of Allende’s movement and its singular appeal to the working class,...

Speaker: Ignacio Agüero, Filmmaker
Moderated by: Haden Guest, Director, Harvard film Archive

Director in Person
$15 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Ignacio Agüero
Chile/UK, 1988, DCP, color and b&w, 55 min
Spanish with English subtitles 
DCP source: Filmmaker

Agüero’s remarkable documentary begins as a tender portrait of influential film historian, educator and activist Alicia Vega (b.1931) teaching a workshop on early film history to impoverished youth living on the outskirts of Santiago....

Directed by Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento
With Rubén Sotoconil, Claudia Paz, Luis Alarcón. Chile, 1967/2020, DCP, black & white, 70 min. Spanish with English subtitles.

Raúl Ruiz (1941 - 2011) is a filmmaker often heralded for prolific filmography, with his entire body of work still a mystery. His partner Valeria Sarmiento was his film editor and most frequent collaborator. After Ruiz’s passing, Sarmiento has been recuperating and giving new life to Ruiz’s films that were deemed lost, unfinished, or both. This program is centered on this newfound form of curatorship...

Directed by Alicia Scherson
With Viviana Herrera, Andres Ulloa, Aline Küppenheim. Argentina/Chile , 2005, DCP, color, 104 min. Spanish and Mapudungun with English subtitles.

Filmed in a hybrid technological style, Alicia Scherson’s dramedy makes use of computers, headphones and video games to bring to life the story of Cristina, a young indigenous woman navigating early-aughts Santiago. A caretaker for an elderly white man, she becomes interested in Tristán, a young worker, but can they make their chemistry work given the social boundaries that separate them? As her journey...

Directed by Raúl Ruiz
With Beatrice Lapido, Rodrigo Ureta, Luis Alarcón. Chile, 1992, DCP, color, 125 min. Spanish with English subtitles.

In 1973 Raúl Ruiz was invited by then-fledgling national film company Chilefilms to direct the biggest-budgeted Chilean feature to date, an adaptation of the best-selling eponymous novel by Enrique Lafourcade. Palomita blanca is a coming-of-age story of a young girl from a poor background who falls in love with the scion of a wealthy upper-class family. From the novel Ruiz maintained only its formulaic fairytale plot and detailed...

Speaker: Andrés Di Tella, Filmmaker and Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor, Harvard University
Moderated by: Ignacio Azcueta, PhD Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

The diary has that rare virtue of never quite being a “work” but, rather, always, a work in process. One writes it every day, without any correction, without knowing fully why, with no other objective than to capture something of the flow of life, the feeling of the moment. In the same way, my project Diaries (Argentina, 2022...

Speaker: Andrés Di Tella, Filmmaker and Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor, Harvard University
Moderated by: Ignacio Azcueta, PhD Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

Photographs (Directed by Andrés Di Tella. Argentina, 2007, DCP, color, 110 min. Spanish with English subtitles.) is the second installment of Andrés Di Tella’s “family trilogy,” a series of subjective documentaries centered on his family. Split between a first part in Argentina and a second part in India, the film functions...

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Speaker: Wesley Verástegui, Filmmaker and Master in Public Policy Candidate, Harvard Kennedy School
Moderated by: Jorge Sánchez Cruz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

Un romance...

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Speakers: Carlos Flores, Director de Cine; Dominga Sotomayor, Directora CCC y Profesora Visitante de Art Film and Visual studies, Harvard University; Haden Guest, Director, Harvard Film Archive

Proyección especial de la película El...

Speaker: Paz Encina, Filmmaker and 2022-23 Radcliffe/Film Study Center Fellow

AEMI is Directed by Paz Encina | Paraguay/Argentina/Mexico/Germany/Netherlands/France/US, 2022, DCP, color, 75 min. Ayoreo, Guaraní and Spanish with English subtitles.

Encina’s latest film EAMI is a moving and sensitive portrait of the indigenous Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, among the last tribes living in isolation in the Amazon but now threatened by rampant and illegal deforestation of their ancestral lands. Encina will be joined in conversation with AFVS Visiting...