Why the Tiananmen Square crackdown is off-limits to Chinese filmmakers and the directors trying to keep history alive
- Director Patricio Guzmán’s latest film, like many others he has made, explores a painful chapter in Chile’s past
- Chinese auteurs do not enjoy the same liberties, with certain historical events subject to strict censorship
The Cordillera of Dreams, which premiered at Cannes earlier this month, is Patricio Guzmán’s 15th feature, though it can be argued that the 77-year-old Chilean director has been making the same film throughout his four-decade career.
Guzmán’s documentaries are based on what he considers to be the most painful chapter in Chile’s contemporary history: the military coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power on September 11, 1973, and the atrocities that followed during his 17-year rule.
Cordillera is the third in a trilogy that also includes Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015). In the latest instalment, Guzmán focuses on the Cordillera de la Costa mountain range – parts of which loom large over the capital, Santiago – and how it has been taken for granted, forgotten and, eventually, abandoned by Chileans, an allusion to how the Pinochet years have receded from the public consciousness in his homeland.
When Guzmán and I met in Cannes in 2010, to discuss Nostalgia for the Light, the director was pessimistic about how his work would be received by the Chilean public, saying his films were more popular in France – his home since the late 1970s. His detractors, Guzmán said, had advised him to move on from making documentaries about the Pinochet period.
But Guzmán is not the only filmmaker trying to keep history alive.
Rithy Panh, who was in Cannes last month to preside over the Caméra d’Or jury, has spent his adult life producing documentaries about the Khmer Rouge regime, which oversaw the killing of more than 1 million people when it ruled his native Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
Rithy Panh’s latest project at Bophana, the audiovisual research centre he founded in Phnom Penh in 2006, was a workshop that trained youngsters from the poorer provinces in filmmaking.
Through their films, the participants are creating an “archive of tomorrow”, he says – which may lead them to understand the country’s Khmer Rouge past, one they themselves might not have lived through.
In the Philippines, Lav Diaz has repeatedly taken aim at the legacy of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos while Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made films hinting at his government’s brutal crackdown on a so-called communist insurgency in the 1970s.
And in By the Time It Gets Dark (2016), fellow Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong tackled the 1976 Thammasat University massacre of students by Thai security forces and state-backed militias.
Although both Apichatpong and Anocha chose – or were forced – to tread lightly, they were at least able to make films on sensitive topics. That is not something Chinese filmmakers can do when the subject is the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Hong Kong directors do enjoy some leeway, but that is fast disappearing.
