Documentary with the pain stripped out

My Imaginary Country is a documentary by legendary director Patricio Guzmán on the 2019-2022 Chile protests in response to a subway fare increase in Santiago.

The documentary has been available in Chile for a year, but it has only recently been released in the UK. It demonstrates how these protests reflected broader societal issues such as rising living costs, unemployment, and huge inequality, with David-and-Goliath confrontations on the streets between protestors armed solely with stones and police equipped with shotguns and armoured vehicles. The bravery and sacrifices of Chile’s working class are awe-inspiring, and Guzmán deserves credit for depicting them in such vivid and heartbreaking detail.

It’s unfortunate that the documentary’s politics are so poor. Unlike Allende’s election, which was portrayed as a party-based revolution, the current movement is portrayed as a true grassroots revolution of the people. Many times, the movement’s effectiveness is linked to its lack of leaders and capacity to function as a social organism without hierarchy.

This concept devolves into farce as the film concludes with a campaign rally for Chile’s current President, Gabriel Boric. Guzmán uses crowd photos that are comparable to earlier protests to demonstrate that Boric is a continuation of the popular movement.

Boric has failed to release political prisoners and has continued Chile’s murderous policies against the Mapuche people. The sequence resembles a political campaign advert rather than a documentary. Thanks to the policy of no leaders and a rejection of organisation, Boric, a pseudo-left charlatan, was able to win the leadership and smother the protests.

Guzmán also draws a positive parallel between the Constituent Convention, convened by the government in reaction to the revolt, and the Chilean Parliament before Pinochet’s coup in 1973. I’m sure the younger Guzmán, who made The Battle of Chile, saw that Parliament as a hive of scum and villainy. Guzmán portrays the assembly as the voice of the people, with members from all walks of life, including the Mapuche. However, it became a diversion of the people’s rage at the state in the hope of replacing Pinochet’s dictator’s constitution. What should have been a document created and owned by the people was co-opted to the abandoned halls of the old parliament.

A chess-playing constituent assembly member is interviewed in the documentary. It is telling that when asked what the worst-case scenario would be, she stated the rejection of the new constitution by the people and the restoration of the right. She could have been predicting the future.

Because the Convention was cut off from the people who had brought its members there, it was simple for the capitalist-owned media to tear the new constitution to shreds in the referendum. The biggest party in the new Constitutional Council is the far-right Republican party. Guzmán was using the chess analogy to show the pawns were the most powerful piece, representing the Chilean people’s strength. He should have used the forced analogy to show how utterly outmanoeuvred and entangled the left had become, checkmate.

What makes this documentary even more agonising is that this is Guzmán’s second revolutionary situation. Instead of learning from Allende’s government and Pinochet’s dictatorship, he makes a saccharine feel-good film. Given that the documentary is just now being screened in the UK, surely some context at the end of the video could have been included. Any observer unfamiliar with current events in Chile would believe the left had triumphed when in fact it had suffered a loss.

The left does not need more phoney victories; it needs painful lessons. I would still recommend this film to anyone interested in learning more about the 2019 protests, but I would start with Guzmán’s older and better films, or at the very least some reading on Chilean politics.