The Pearl Button

In his most recent poetic film, Guzmán continues his excavation of Chile’s hidden past, fluidly shifting between the cosmic and the particular. Like his 2010 film essay, Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button beautifully weaves together strands of history and of natural history; this time Guzmán probes the significance of water in order to reflect both on the decimation of the indigenous people of Patagonia—the nomadic Kaweskar or “water people”—as a result of European colonization and on the brutality of the Pinochet regime, decades later, that dropped victims into the sea from the air.