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NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT

The old German telescope,

...that I've seen once again after so many years,

...is still working

...in Santiago, Chile.

I owe my passion for astronomy to it.

These objects, which could have come...

...from my childhood home,

...remind me of that far-off moment...

...when one thinks one has left childhood behind.

At that time, Chile was a haven of peace...

...isolated from the world.

Santiago slept...

...in the foothills of the Cordillera, detached from the rest of the world.

I loved science-fiction stories,

...lunar eclipses

...and watching the sun through a piece of smoky glass.

I learnt by heart the name of certain stars

...and had a map of the sky.

It was a simple provincial life.

Nothing ever happened.

The Presidents of the Republic...

...walked unescorted through the streets.

Only the present moment existed.

One day this peaceful life came to an end.

A revolutionary tide swept us to the centre of the world.

I was lucky to be a part of this noble venture...

...which woke us all from our slumber.

This time of hope is forever engraved in my soul.

At around the same time,

...science fell in love with the Chilean sky.

A group of astronomers...

...found they could touch the stars...

...in the Atacama Desert.

Enveloped in star dust,

...scientists from all over the planet

...created the biggest telescopes in the world.

Some time later,

...a coup d'etat swept away democracy, dreams...

...and science.

Despite living in a devastation zone,

Chilean astronomers...

...carried on working, supported by their foreign colleagues.

One by one, the secrets of the sky...

...began to fall upon us like translucent rain.

In Chile, astronomy is a passion shared by many.

I'm just one enthusiast amongst thousands.

Our humid planet has only one small brown patch...

...that has absolutely no humidity.

The vast Atacama Desert.

I imagine that man will soon walk on Mars.

This ground beneath my feet...

...bears the strongest resemblance to that faraway world.

There is nothing.

No insects, no animals, no birds.

And yet, it is full of history.

For 10,000 years,

...this region has been a transit route.

Rivers of stone...

...provided natural paths.

The caravans of llamas and men...

...came and went between the high plains and the sea.

It's a condemned land, permeated with salt,

...where human remains are mummified and objects are frozen in time.

The air,

...transparent, thin,

...allows us to read...

...this vast open book of memory

...page after page.

The telescopes...

...are the window to the cosmos.

This is where the celestial mystery begins.

In the glow of the night, the stars observe us.

At the bottom of the lakes of sand...

...are petrified fish and molluscs.

I can pick them up with my hands.

The hills and the Indian fortresses merge into one.

Apparently there are meteorites under the rocks...

...that can affect a compass.

I have always believed...

...that our origins could be found in the ground,

...buried beneath the soil or at the bottom of the sea.

But now, I think that our roots are up above,

...beyond the light.

Where do we come from,

...where are we and where are we going?

Where do we come from? It's a key question.

It has always been at the core of our civilisations.

As for religion,

...the world of science today...

...tends to separate science from religion.

And yet the fundamental questions pondered by man

are of a religious origin and motive.

That's my opinion.

It's a matter of discovering the origins of mankind,

...of our planet, the solar system.

Finding out how a galaxy, a planet or a star is born.

All these questions about our origins,

...we astronomers try to answer.

It's a never-ending story.

What eats away at the astronomer is "the origin of".

I study diffuse galaxies whose origins are a mystery.

We don't know why they do not self-destruct.

We try to shed light on these difficult questions.

That is science.

We try to answer two questions,

...we do so as best we can, and four more arise.

That is the nature of science.

Some say that we're not very efficient,

...that in answering two questions, we trigger four others.

But that's science; it's never resolved.

That's what I like about it.

The mystery of science is eternal.

Below these domes...

...are other messages which also come from afar.

These rock carvings, made by pre-Columbian shepherds,

are over 1,000 years old.

Here, more than anywhere else,

I feel that the desert...

...is revealing a secret.

All of our life experiences,

...including this conversation, happened in the past.

Even if it is a matter of millionths of a second.

The camera I am looking at now is a few metres away...

...and is therefore already several millionths of a second in the past...

...in relation to the time on my watch.

The signal takes time to arrive.

The light reflected from the camera or from you,

...reaches me after a moment.

A fleeting moment, as the speed of light is very fast.

How long does it take for moonlight to reach us?

Just over a second.

- And sunlight? - Eight minutes.

So we don't see things at the very instant we look at them?

No, that's the trap.

The present doesn't exist.

It's true.

The only present that might exist...

...is the one in my mind.

It's the closest we come to the absolute present.

And not even then! When I think,

...it takes a moment for the signal to travel between my senses.

Between when I say "this is me" and when I touch myself,

...there is a lapse in time.

The past is the astronomers' main tool.

We manipulate the past.

We are used to living behind the times.

That's how it is.

Like an archaeologist who also studies the past.

Exactly.

A not-so-distant past, but it's the same.

- He tries to imagine... - Exactly.

A historian does the same thing.

Geologists, too.

They know that the deeper they dig, the older the things they'll find.

It's the same for us.

The present is a fine line.

A puff of air would destroy it.

On this flat rock face...

...are the outlines of two human faces, perhaps masks.

They were carved by the pre-Columbian shepherds...

...who passed through here.

It was a natural route to San Pedro de Atacama.

These drawings resemble those carved on the mountain opposite.

We are on the prehistoric road that runs alongside the rock drawings.

The modern road was laid on top of the old one.

There on the right,

...we can see drawings of llamas and people.

The astronomers...

...created an enormous telescope...

...to bring two seemingly incompatible things closer:

...the origins of everything...

...and the past of everything we are today.

Two different situations...

Today they receive the past.

But, at the same time, they receive the most distant past of all...

...which is the origin of the whole system.

They study one past and we study another.

They are in the present recording a past...

...which they have to reconstruct.

They have only minute clues.

They are archaeologists like us.

Why are some places more suitable for this study of the past?

It's a real mystery.

The question is: why are there archaeologists and astronomers...

...in the same place?

The answer is simple.

Here, the past is more accessible than elsewhere.

The translucency of the sky...

is, for the archaeologists of space,

...what the dry climate is for us.

It facilitates our access to evidence from the past.

The translucency enables the astronomers...

...to shed light on the mysteries of space.

This is why we share the same territory.

We are at a gateway to the past.

That's right. It's a gateway we know how to go through.

But when we come out again,

...will we have made discoveries that will shake our lives forever?

This remains a mystery to me.

And yet, this country has not yet considered its past.

It is held in the grasp of the coup d'etat...

...which seems to immobilise it.

This is the paradox which concerns you most.

This is where the problem lies.

It's worthy of your concern.

I totally agree with you.

It's true that it's paradoxical.

We've hidden away...

...our nearest past.

It's a huge paradox.

Listen, we know hardly anything about the 19th century.

How many secrets are we keeping...

...about the 19th century?

We have never acknowledged that we marginalised our Indians.

It's practically a state secret.

We've done nothing to try to understand...

...why, in the 19th century,

...staggering economic phenomena such as saltpetre appeared,

...yet today there's nothing left.

We've kept our recent past hidden.

We've concealed it.

It's absurd.

We avoid looking at this recent history.

It's as if this history might accuse us.

And that, dear friend, helps no one.

Not the right, not the centre, not the left.

Like other of the planet's deserts,

...the Chilean desert is an ocean of buried minerals.

In the open air...

...lie men who died working.

Like geological layers,

...layers of miners and of Indians...

...are swept by a relentless wind.

They were nomadic families.

Their belongings, their memories are nearby.

Near the observatories, in the middle of this vast emptiness...

...are the ruins of Chacabuco,

...the biggest concentration camp of Pinochet's dictatorship.

The ruins of this camp...

...are in fact the ruins of a mine.

The military didn't have to build a camp, as, by way of cells,

...they used the houses of the 19th-century miners,

...a time when the mining industry was like slavery.

All the military had to do...

...was to add barbed wire.

I was imprisoned in a concentration camp in the North

...from November 9th, 1973,

...until October 1974.

In Chacabuco, did you hear of a group...

...who observed the stars?

Yes, I was part of this group.

There were about 20 of us.

Was the person who led the group an astronomer?

He was a doctor who knew a lot about astronomy: Dr Alvarez.

During the day, he gave us theory lessons...

...and, at night, we went outside to watch the stars.

What we learnt of astronomy...

...was to recognise the constellations.

- Did you have a telescope? - No.

The sky was so transparent...

...that the stars...

...were like small light bulbs.

How did you find the constellations?

He showed us how to make a device.

A tripod with a dial on top...

...that showed the hours.

A kind of balance contraption was fixed on that...

...with a needle and two crossed wires.

That served as a viewfinder.

What did you feel watching the stars whilst in prison?

We all had a feeling...

...of great freedom.

Observing the sky and the stars,

...marvelling at the constellations,

...we felt completely free.

"In this house lived the following political prisoners:

Victor Astudillo,

Luis Henriquez,

Ren� Olivares,

Enrique..." You can only see the "E".

"Enrique Pastorelli." I remember him well.

And here: "Federico Quilodr�n Ch�vez."

The military banned the astronomy lessons.

They were convinced that the prisoners could escape...

...guided by the constellations.

Luis's dignity lies in his memory.

He wasn't able to escape,

...but, by communicating with the stars,

...he managed to preserve his inner freedom.

He remembers traces that have been erased,

...electric cables, watchtowers.

Luis is a transmitter of history.

Miguel, the architect of memory,

...is also a lover of stars.

He was in five detention centres...

...where he contemplated the sky and used his memory...

...to carve each prison into his mind.

When the military saw...

...the published drawings of the camps which they had dismantled,

...they were dumbstruck.

Like that.

That's how you measured?

That's right.

When I decided to leave a testimony...

...of what a concentration camp in Chile was like,

...I began to measure in this way the different spaces,

...so as to be able to draw them one day if I ever got out.

Each day as I walked to work,

I discreetly measured the assembly courtyard.

It measured 30 metres, ten by three or five by six.

There.

30 metres.

Here something important is missing.

At the far end was a solitary confinement block.

It measured six by nine.

Here, there was another row of barbed wire.

It was everywhere.

At night, by candle light,

...I made my drawings.

When I'd finished,

...I tore them into tiny shreds...

...that I hid in case of a night raid.

The next day, I was one of the first up

...and I went to the latrines to get rid of them.

I memorised it all easily...

...and, when I was in exile in Denmark,

...I drew these places again as if I'd known them all my life.

That is memory.

An architect, at least, is capable...

...of memorising all the dimensions.

Miguel and his wife...

...are for me a metaphor of Chile.

He is remembering...

...whilst Anita is forgetting...

...as she has Alzheimer's disease.

At an altitude of 5,000 metres, the radio telescope ALMA...

...is being made by several countries.

It will have 60 antennas,

...or 60 ears to listen to the waves of the sky.

It will be able to listen to bodies...

...whose light doesn't reach the earth.

It will register the energy produced during the Big Bang.

Victor, a 29-year-old engineer,

...will be one of the rare witnesses to this event...

...which to me seems so unreal.

How did you get into astronomy?

My mother encouraged me to apply to ESO, the observatory.

- You were born in Germany? - Yes, Germany.

- So you are a child of exile. - I'm a child from nowhere.

I'm not from Chile, nor am I from the country where I was born.

- Do you feel comfortable here? - Yes, I feel Chilean.

I am Chilean.

The energy this antenna will detect...

...was emitted billions of years ago.

It is from the past and only reaches us today...

...but it belongs to history, to the past.

Your mother was expelled from Chile during the dictatorship.

Nowadays, she cares for ex-prisoners who were tortured.

Are you aware that you and your mother work in the past?

The past is at the core of our work.

Both of us...

...try to learn from the past, from history,

...to build a better future.

According to one official commission,

...30,000 people were tortured in Chile.

But it is estimated...

...that another 30,000 did not come forward.

The women who search for their dead...

...demand an answer...

...from those responsible for the disappearances.

These women...

...come across those who participated in the disappearance of their relatives...

...in the streets of their villages.

The torturers...

...who walk free in the streets.

This kind of situation is traumatic for those affected.

Crossing paths with someone...

...who arrested their husband or son...

...traumatises them all over again.

Maybe this is one of the differences...

...between the two searches of the past.

What do you think of these women...

...who search for the remains of their loved ones?

They continue to sift the desert.

To compare two completely different things,

...their process is similar to ours, with one big difference.

We can sleep peacefully,

...after each night spent observing the past.

Our search doesn't disturb our sleep.

Sometimes the heat bothers us, but we sleep.

The next day, we plunge back, untroubled, into the past.

But these women must find it hard to sleep...

...after searching through human remains,

...looking for a past they are unable to find.

They'll not sleep well until they do so.

That is the major difference.

There's no comparison.

That's my opinion.

What is strange...

...is that society should understand these women better...

...than it does astronomers.

But the opposite is true.

Society has a greater understanding of the astronomers,

...in their search for the past,

...than of these women who search for human remains.

There is a certain reticence and that worries me.

People say, "It's in the past, enough's enough!"

That's easy to say.

Until they find their loved ones,

...they'll never find peace.

I can't imagine what they must be going through.

I don't know what I'd do...

...if a sister, a brother or one of my parents...

...were lost somewhere in the desert,

...in this vast expanse.

Personally, as an astronomer,

...I would imagine my father or mother in space,

...lost in the galaxy somewhere.

I would look for them through the telescopes.

I would be very anxious...

...as it would be difficult to find them in the vastness.

It's the same for these women...

...as the Atacama Desert is so immense.

Who knows where they are?

For 17 years, Pinochet assassinated and buried the bodies...

...of thousands of political prisoners.

So that the bodies could never be found,

...the dictatorship dug them up and disposed of the remains elsewhere...

...or threw them into the sea.

The women of Calama searched for 28 years,

...until 2002.

Some of them continue to search as victims are still being found.

During the shooting of this film, they found the body...

...of a disappeared female prisoner...

...in another part of the desert.

These women...

...provided us with various facts,

...one of which proved vital.

Whilst searching in the desert,

...they discovered something curious:

...tiny pieces of human bones.

An expert confirmed that these were indeed human bones.

It was strange, the pieces were so tiny.

They weren't skeletons,

...but fragments of skulls, of feet,

...shards of long bones.

When they took us there,

...we, as archaeologists,

...noticed that the soil had been turned over.

These fragments, which are flat,

...must be the splinters of a thighbone or the bone of an arm.

The exterior of these bones is smooth.

This must be the inside of a bone...

...as it is porous.

It is much thicker.

Their whiteness is due to calcination by the sun.

What did you find of your brother?

A foot. It was still in his shoe.

Some of his teeth.

I found part of his forehead, his nose,

...nearly all of the left side of his skull.

The bit behind the ear with a bullet mark.

The bullet came out here.

That shows he was shot from below.

I don't know what position he was in.

They finished him off with a bullet in the forehead.

All of this part of the skull was shattered.

They shot him twice in the head.

I remembered his tender expression...

...and this was all that remained.

A few teeth and bits of bones.

And a foot.

Our final moment together,

...was when his foot was at my house.

When the mass grave was discovered,

...I knew it was his shoe and his foot.

That night, I got up...

...and went to stroke his foot.

There was... a smell of decay.

It was still in a sock.

A burgundy sock.

Dark red.

I took it out of the bag and looked at it.

I remained sitting in the lounge for a long time.

My mind was blank.

I was incapable of thinking.

I was in total shock.

The next day, my husband went to work...

...and I spent all morning with my brother's foot.

We were reunited.

It was a great joy and a great disappointment...

...because only then did I take in the fact that my brother was dead.

The bodies of Calama...

...were dug up with a machine.

A machine that digs,

...with five teeth.

These bodies were dug up on the orders of the military high command.

But fragments of skulls...

...fell from the right side of the machine,

...and of feet, from the left side.

The bodies were loaded onto a truck.

We photographed the marks and reconstructed the operation.

The bodies were then taken to a place which even today remains unknown.

The truck had a driver.

There were soldiers to unload the bodies.

And, most importantly, the truck was part of a detachment,

...a division under military authority.

It's up to the military to provide this information...

...so that our friends from Calama...

...can give their dead the burial they deserve.

Will you carry on searching?

For as long as I can,

...if we must carry on searching,

...I will do so.

Even if I have many doubts...

...and I ask myself questions which I can't answer.

They say they unearthed them, put them in bags...

...and threw them into the sea.

Did they really throw them into the sea?

I can't find the answer to this question.

What if they threw them out nearby, somewhere in the mountains?

At this point in my life,

...I'm 70,

...I find it hard to believe what I'm told.

They taught me not to believe.

It's hard for me.

Sometimes I feel like an idiot...

...because I never stop asking questions...

...and nobody gives me the answers I want.

If someone were to tell me...

...they threw them out on the top of that mountain,

...I would find a way of getting right to the top.

I'm not as strong as I was 20 years ago.

I'm not as healthy.

It would be difficult.

But hope gives you strength.

I no longer count the times...

...Vicky and I have gone into the desert.

We set out full of hope...

...and return with our heads hanging.

But we always pick ourselves up,

...give ourselves a shake

... and set off again the next day even more hopeful...

...and more impatient to find them.

Some people must wonder...

...why we want bones.

I want them so much!

And I'm not the only one.

When they found one of Mario's jawbones,

...I told them I didn't want it.

I told Dr Patricia Hern�ndez,

"I want him whole."

"They took him away whole, I don't want just a piece of him."

And I'm not saying it just for him,

...but for all the disappeared.

All of them!

If I found him today and I were to die tomorrow,

...I would die happy.

But I don't want to die.

I don't want to die before I find him.

As I told you the other day,

...I wish the telescopes...

...didn't just look into the sky,

...but could also see through the earth...

...so that we could find them.

Like this...

Then, a bit further on.

We would sweep the desert with a telescope.

Downwards.

And give thanks to the stars for helping us find them.

I'm just dreaming.

These lines you see on the screen form a spectrum.

This is the digital imprint of a star.

This is the spectrum.

These are the calcium lines of the star.

If my son had been executed during any dictatorship,

...no matter who I was, my education or my beliefs,

...I would never be able to forget.

I would be morally obliged to preserve his memory.

We cannot forget our dead.

We must keep them in our memory.

The courts of justice must do their work,

...human rights organisations too,

...everyone involved must take a stand.

That's to be expected.

But we absolutely cannot forget a tragedy like this.

PISAGUA MASS GRAVE JUNE 1990

We must continue the search.

If they were thrown into the sea,

...we will find a trace of them someday.

Many were indeed thrown into the sea.

If they put the bodies in a mine,

...an abandoned place, we'll find them eventually.

It suits them that there are fewer and fewer of us women.

Fewer problems.

Because we are a problem.

For society, for justice, for everyone.

For them we are the lowest of the low.

We are Chile's leprosy.

That's what I think.

IT WAS NOT A WAR IT WAS A MASSACRE

There were many groups of women searching:

...in Arica, Iquique,

...Pisagua, La Serena,

...Colina, Paine, Lonqu�n,

Concepci�n, Temuco,

Punta Arenas...

These women's search never crossed paths with that of the astronomers...

...who were tracking another kind of body: celestial bodies.

Whilst these women handled the desert matter...

...the astronomers discovered that the earth's matter...

...was the same throughout the cosmos.

10,000 years ago, the first inhabitants of Atacama...

...gathered the pebbles washed up by the sea.

They also knew something of the stars...

...and they buried their dead at night.

Scientists collected the remains of these men of antiquity...

...and classified them meticulously.

They studied them...

...like the pages of a unique book...

...and today preserve them like treasure.

When I was a child, my mother took me to a museum...

...to see the skeleton of a whale.

I stayed for a long time...

...beneath this skeleton that is still there today.

I imagined it was the roof of a house...

...where other whales could live.

Today, there are other skeletons...

...that are not in a museum.

They are made of calcium,

...the same calcium that stars are made of.

But unlike them, they have no names.

We don't know which souls they belonged to.

They are the remains of remains.

The remains of the disappeared of the military dictatorship...

...that have not yet been identified.

I wonder...

...for how long they will lie in these boxes.

Will they be placed in a monument one day?

Will they have earned a museum space like the whale?

Will they be given a burial one day?

Valentina works for the leading astronomy organisation in Chile.

Her grandfather taught her to observe the sky...

...when she was a child.

She is married with two children.

In 1975, when she was one year old,

...she was detained with her grandparents by Pinochet's police.

I am the daughter of detained and disappeared parents.

First they detained my grandparents.

They were held for several hours.

They threatened them relentlessly...

...to make them reveal where my parents were,

...or else I, too, would disappear.

With this threat,

...my grandparents took them to where we lived.

After detaining my parents,

...they returned me to my grandparents who brought me up.

Astronomy has somehow helped me...

...to give another dimension to the pain,

...to the absence,

...to the loss.

Sometimes, when one is alone with that pain,

...and these moments are necessary,

...the pain becomes oppressive.

I tell myself it's all part of a cycle...

...which didn't begin and won't end with me,

...nor with my parents, or with my children.

I tell myself we are all part of a current,

...of an energy, a recyclable matter.

Like the stars which must die...

...so that other stars can be born, other planets, a new life.

In this context,

...what happened to my parents

...and their absence take on another dimension.

It takes on another meaning and frees me a little...

...from this great suffering,

...as I feel that nothing really comes to an end.

My grandparents are the happiness in my life.

Thanks to them, I've been able to write my own story.

Not merely from a painful perspective...

...but also a joyful one,

...optimistic,

...driven by this strength and the desire to progress.

My grandparents were wise...

...realising they had a double responsibility.

They found a way...

...to make my parents important reference points for me.

They passed on my parents' values and their strength.

What is more, my grandparents were able to overcome their pain...

...so that I could have...

...a happy and healthy childhood.

Sometimes I feel like...

...I'm a product with a manufacturing defect...

...which is invisible.

I find it funny when people tell me that it doesn't show...

...that I'm the daughter of disappeared prisoners.

I realise that my children don't have this defect.

Nor does my husband and that makes me happy.

I am surrounded by people...

...who have no manufacturing defect.

I am happy that my son is growing up like this.

Compared to the immensity of the cosmos,

...the problems of the Chilean people might seem insignificant.

But if we laid them out on a table,

...they would be as vast as a galaxy.

Whilst making this film, looking back,

...I found in these marbles...

...the innocence of the Chile of my childhood.

Back then,

...each of us could carry the entire universe...

...in the depths of our pockets.

I am convinced that memory has a gravitational force.

It is constantly attracting us.

Those who have a memory...

...are able to live in the fragile present moment.

Those who have none...

...don't live anywhere.

Each night, slowly, impassively,

...the centre of the galaxy passes over Santiago.

Subtitles by Katie Henfrey

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