Nostalgia for the Light

Synopsis

At 10,000 feet altitude in Chile's Atacama Desert—the driest place on Earth where the hyper-transparent atmosphere hosts the world's most powerful astronomical observatories peering into the origins of the cosmos—elderly Chilean women sift through the scorching bone-dry soil with small shovels searching for the fragments of human bones of their children murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship. Patricio Guzmán's Cannes-premiering and European Film Award-winning visual essay interweaving astronomy, geological memory, and human loss.