Film

The Battle of Chile: Part I

Name: The Battle of Chile: Part I
Genre: Documentary, History
Released: 1975
Cast: Salvador Allende, Abilio Fernández

Shot on smuggled film stock in the months before the 1973 coup, this is history caught mid-collapse rather than reconstructed after the fact. Guzmán's crew embeds with strikers, soldiers and politicians as Chile's democracy tears itself apart in real time. It's dense, argumentative and occasionally exhausting — closer to a live wire than a lecture — best suited to anyone who wants to feel a country's institutions actually failing.

TMDb rating

7.6

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Salt of the Earth1954

Both films were made by people risking their own safety to document the struggle in front of them, blurring documentary and drama until the act of filming becomes an act of resistance itself.

Made by blacklisted American filmmakers using real striking miners as actors, this is a plainspoken, quietly radical drama about labor and dignity that got its makers investigated for the crime of making it.

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A friendship between a wealthy boy and a poor classmate plays out against the exact backdrop this documentary captures, showing how the coup reached down into a schoolyard. Tender, then brutal.

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Guzmán's own follow-up, tracking the legal pursuit of Pinochet decades on, with survivors and victims' families finally given the floor. A necessary sequel to the outrage of Part I.

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Nanni Moretti's documentary revisits the Italian embassy in Santiago, which sheltered Chileans fleeing Pinochet's death squads, through interviews with people who lived it. A smaller, warmer companion to Guzmán's epic.

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The Death of Stalin2017

Same machinery — a state suddenly leaderless, propaganda scrambling to control the story — but where Guzmán shows the terror as it happens, this shows the absurdity it always secretly contained.

A pitch-black farce about the scramble for power after Stalin's death, packed with brilliant actors turning bureaucratic terror into comedy so sharp it still draws blood.

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People

Cast

Salvador AllendeSelf (archive footage)
Abilio FernándezSelf - Narrator (voice)

Directing

Jose BartolomeAssistant Director
Patricio GuzmánDirector

Writing

Production

Pablo de la BarraProducer