To kill the unprecedented experience of the “thousand days” of the Allende government’s Popular Unity, a brutal dictatorship led by Pinochet was necessary. What was the danger? What happened during those three years, so obscured from Chilean history?
Some of those who accompanied Salvador Allende on this adventure recount the hope and enthusiasm of the socialist dream, but also the difficulties and the struggle for greater equality and sharing in the face of liberal cruelty.
Letter from Claudia Soto Mansilla
I grew up in Cuba, with its sea, its heat, its music. My parents had a different accent than those we lived alongside, and their memories had nothing to do with what surrounded me. In our apartment, photos of Allende sat alongside those of Che and Camilo Cienfuegos; my mother had hung strips of woven wool. Later, I learned that they were Mapuche, that they came from the Indians of Chile, the country where I was born.
I loved looking at Salvador Allende’s face, his thick-framed glasses and his mustache. An elegant, old-fashioned man. I knew early on that he was dead; I could recite his last speech by heart. As I grew older, my attraction to the man only grew. I wanted to know everything about him, read all his speeches, listen to all the stories that evoked his will, his desire for justice, his love for his people, his visionary ability to understand the world.
I didn’t understand how the country where I was born, a small, improbable country at the end of the world, could have produced two Nobel Prize winners for poetry, a president like Salvador Allende, and one of the worst dictators, all in two generations.
Following my parents into exile, I grew up elsewhere. I had the opportunity to be a child without the terrible burden of living in a country under dictatorship.
For twenty years, I believed that Chile was my country, that I had a place there. But Chile without the military did not become the country of justice and freedom for which my parents and many others fought so hard, suffered so much, and gave so much. Disillusionment almost succeeded in making me indifferent to the land where I was born, yet its history still fascinated me. The more I learned, the more I was drawn to it. I refused to give in to bitterness, to defeatism; I refused to have no reason to link my destiny as an adult woman to my native country.
My passion for writing and cinema ultimately gave birth to this film. Meeting my partner Jaco, a trained photographer and a lover of revolutions, gave me the strength to see it through to the end. I set out in search of beauty, of the generosity expressed by a people taking their destiny into their own hands.
We are survivors, we have a voice, we have a memory that must be passed on, that must live on, that is a powerful tool for consolidating the present and building the future.
Letter from Jaco Bidermann
Coming from a left-wing background with activist parents, Allende’s Chile has always been part of my political imagination. Yet the narratives of the dictatorship were stronger, omnipresent. Like a veil preventing one from seeing beyond.
Meeting Claudia, going to Chile, and making this film allowed me to lift that veil and take stock of the unique experience of those thousand days.
Cinema is also about bearing witness, exploring, and shedding light. I’m also a theater lighting designer; I like to illuminate and make actors look beautiful.
I was often moved to tears behind the camera, hearing the stories of these men and women who often spent their lives fighting for a more just society.
Chilean history is a distillation of the 20th century: a Popular Front, a revolutionary and democratic socialist government, a coup d’état, a dictatorship, and the laboratory of globalized neoliberalism.
It’s a story full of horror and life. So that ultimately, horror doesn’t have the last word and so that this unique experience can continue to resonate, it seemed important to me to make this film.