Cantata of Chile

A stylised fresco of constant class struggle interfacing the mythic dimensions of a reconstruction of the 1907 Iquique massacre, when 3,600 Latin American workers died following strikes in the British-owned nitrate mines. A fervent, inspirational hymn to resistance and solidarity, the film encodes its political analysis in its montage of sounds and images, which occasionally overwhelm in their emotive intensity (unfortunately so in a couple of passages of excruciating violence). In part it recalls Jancsó, and is in some way the film Bertolucci would have liked to have made of 1900, vindicating the epic spectacle as a progressive form.