Patricio Guzmán, director of The Battle of Chile, dies in Paris at 85
Patricio Guzmán, the Chilean documentary director whose camera recorded the fall of Salvador Allende, died in Paris on Tuesday, September 15. He was 85.
His wife confirmed the death to AFP, as carried by AFP. Deadline reported the news on September 16.
Guzmán was born in Santiago, Chile, on August 11, 1941. He left Chile in the 1960s to study at the Official Cinema School in Madrid, training that shaped a career spent almost entirely in non-fiction film.
In 1971, Allende's government appointed him head of documentary at Chile Films, the centralised state film body. From that post he began filming political life in Chile in the months before the military coup.
The result was his three-part 1975-79 documentary The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of an Unarmed People. It chronicled the final year of Allende, the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, and organised resistance in the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Guzmán was arrested and detained briefly after the 1973 coup before leaving Chile. He settled first in Madrid and then in Paris, where he lived and worked in exile.
His later films returned repeatedly to the legacy of Chile's military dictatorship. Nostalgia for the Light in 2010, The Pearl Button in 2015 and The Cordillera of Dreams in 2019 form a trilogy on that history and its long aftermath.
That late work was honoured at major European festivals. The Pearl Button won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay, one of the main prizes at the Berlin Film Festival. The Cordillera of Dreams won the Golden Eye, the documentary prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
His final documentary, My Imaginary Country in 2022, turned to Chile's contemporary politics. It explored the youth-led protests of 2019 over democracy and social equality.
For audiences discovering his films now, the through-line is direct. A film-maker who began by filming events as they unfolded spent five decades asking what those events left behind.
