Actas de Marusia is a powerful, very, very violent epic about a massacre in Chile in 1907. It's a film about Chile made in Chihuaha by Chilean director Miguel Littín (who also made films in Nicaragua). This is a dark film about labor and organizing – along the lines of I Compagni, La Venganza, Ådalen 31, or Blood on the Land. As I've noted before, this topic was an important conversation in cinema across the globe, as you can see by the range of locations in these titles – movies coming from Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Greece respectively.
Actas de Marusia also is clear to mark the racism/colonialism that fuels this violence. The soldiers see themselves as killing Indios, not Chileans like themselves.
Finally, Actas de Marusia is also about contemporary violence in Chile in the mid-1970s; it includes torture sequences that seemed to me to reference Pinochet. There's even an intriguing moment where the military men talk about how they're being funded by the U.S. government! In any case, this film is epic. It's extraordinarily made, it must have cost a fortune, and its politics are decidedly leftist and anti-racist.
No comments:
Post a Comment