THE PEARL BUTTON by Patricio Guzman @ Municipal Library (Prague, CZ)
El boton de nacar (Documentary, France/Spain/Chile/Switzerland). This screening was part of the One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, and took place on 12/03/2016, 15:00.
For all the frustration that the One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival caused me, I am still quite grateful that it offered me the opportunity to see The Pearl Button, which is certainly one of the most powerful films I have seen since the start of the year. In fact, even as I am writing this now, I struggle to find the confidence to even think about writing a review about it yet. I still need some time to think about it, and to digest it.
The film won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the 2015 Berlinale, and ever since then I had heard nothing but great things about it from my most trusted sources. Recently, my friend Mark Cousins also voiced his favourable opinion on the film. Therefore, I had been waiting a long time to see it. Despite the fact that it had screened in Prague sometime earlier, I had not been able to go, because the film was never subtitled in English. But actually, while I watched the film, very often I realized that I didn't need the subtitled at all, and that in this film, I could understand Spanish quite well (in other films, not at all).
It's hard for me to narrow down a film that manages to ambitiously explain the tragic history of Chile's heritage, the Westernization of its culture, the horrors of the Pinochet years, by using the metaphor of the immensity of the ocean, a being with memory and in which many secrets are concealed. The film moves at a slow and lyrical pace, and as I really hoped and somehow expected, it had me completely hooked from start to finish. I fell in a type of meditative trance, but was also compelled and downright disturbed at many of its moments. I looked to be immersed by images, and as I often do when I can for these films, decided to sit right on the front row.
At the end of the screening, a Q and A session was scheduled, not with the director who did not attend the screening, but a teacher or a photographer or both, I believe. For once, I willfully stayed behind. Not because I was particularly interested in what he would say. In fact, all I can remember him saying was that as an atheist he did not agree with the theme of spirituality with the film, which I found to be a shallow statement to say the least. The reason why I stayed behind was that, I guess, I wasn't quite ready to enter the outside world yet. And also because by staying behind, it was as if I was metaphorically, or metaphysically, embracing those who had been part of a viewing experience with me. This gave me comfort. Somehow I feel, I was not the only one.