BSDLR

Our idea sounded very simple on paper, but proved to be risky in practice. The plan was to film an underground documentary on the increasingly desperate situation in Chile after twelve years of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. I had been unable to get the idea of making this film out of my mind. I had lost the image of my country in a fog of nostalgia. The Chile I remembered no longer existed, and for a filmmaker there could be no surer way of rediscovering a lost country than by going back to it and filming it from the inside. In 1983 the dream grew more persistent as the Chilean goverment began publishing lists of exiles who would be allowed to return. But my name did not appear on any of them. The dream reached a pitch of desperation later, when the Chilean government published the list of 5,000 names of those who could still not come back and this time my name was among them. When the plan to enter Chile illegally took shape as a reality, almost by chance and unexpectedly, I had already given up on it more than two years before.