Tonight, October 25, 2012, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light premieres on POV (check your local listings). Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light is a remarkable meditation on memory, history and eternity. Chile’s remote Atacama Desert, 10,000 feet above sea level, provides stunningly clear views of the heavens. But it also holds secrets from the past in its arid soil: human remains, from pre-Columbian mummies to the bones of political prisoners “disappeared” during the Pinochet dictatorship. In this otherworldly place, earthly and celestial quests meld: Archaeologists dig for ancient civilizations, women search for their loved ones and astronomers scan the skies for new galaxies.
Read what critics are saying about Nostalgia for the Light:
“Rates as the filmmaker’s masterpiece, an exquisitely filmed, poetically written meditation on how past and present fuse in humanity’s most unresolved questions.”
— Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
“Guzmán offers a poetic narrative that celebrates the searches and insists on the moral obligation to remember Chile’s not-too-distant past.”
— Walter V. Addiago, San Francisco Chronicle
“Visually elegant, deeply felt. . . . Nothing here is as beautiful, perhaps, as certain everyday images Guzman puts on display: the gears working on an old telescope, a tree against the exterior wall of a house in Santiago, many marbles arrayed on a table.”
— Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe
“It isn’t simply that Nostalgia for the Light is moving: it has a tragic grandeur that really is very remarkable. It is deeply intelligent, intensely and painfully political, and yet attempts, and succeeds, somehow to transcend politics and perhaps even history itself. . . . This is one of the films of the year.”
— Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“Packs a potent intellectual and emotional wallop. . . . Nostalgia for the Light is less a conventional documentary than a work of poetic imagination or a nontheistic spiritual meditation. Enormously moving and wondrous to behold.”
— Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com
Watch Nostalgia for the Light tonight on PBS. (check local listings), or stream it online for a limited time starting Friday, October 26, 2012.
Then visit us on Twitter @povdocs, Facebook, or our companion site for Nostalgia for the Light to tell us what you thought of the film.
Keep up with POV films and get alerts when videos are available for streaming at http://pbs.org/pov, on Twitter @povdocs or on Facebook.
