Atacama Desert – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

THE MYSTERIOUS GAZE OF THE FLAMINGO – Review by April Neale

December 5, 2025 April Neale Atacama Desert, chilean films, Diego Céspedes, lgbtq, Oscar submission, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo

Set in the early 1980s, when fear of a mysterious new illness spread faster than the information to explain it, Diego Céspedes’ debut feature, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, is a haunting coming-of-age story set against one of the first global waves of HIV/AIDS panic. Set deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert in 1982, the film explores what happens to a community already living on the edges of society when superstition, isolation, and fear close in. Céspedes’ debut is gentle yet devastating, tender yet unflinching. It reminds us that love is both dangerous and transformative.

Essays

NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT and Chile’s Atacama Desert – Diane Carson reports

October 18, 2024October 19, 2024 Diane Carson Atacama Desert, Augusto Pinochet, chile, chilean films, documentary, nostalgia for the light, patricio guzman

Chilean writer/director Patricio Guzmán’s 2010 documentary Nostalgia for the Light provides a dramatic introduction to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, located between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. The film surveys astronomers interrogating origins of the cosmos, archeological evidence, and the heartbreaking unearthing of bone fragments of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s murdered victims, their bodies discarded in the desert. The highest desert in the world, averaging over 8200 feet and the driest nonpolar desert in the world, Atacama all but defies description. Even having seen Nostalgia for the Light before my recent visit, nothing prepared me for the week I spent experiencing its diverse ecosystems and historical richness.

Festivals Reviews

THE MOVIE TELLER (TIFF 2023) – Review by Emma Badame

September 19, 2023September 19, 2023 Emma Badame Alondra Valenzuela, Antonio de la Torre, Atacama Desert, berenice bejo, Daniel Brühl, Hernán Rivera Letelier, La Contadora de Películas, lone scherfig, Sara Becker, The Movie Teller, TIFF 2023

Cinematic love letters to the art and magic of movies are common enough and more often than not, are told from the perspective of a young boy, eager to experience all the technicolor adventures on the big screen have to offer. With The Movie Teller (La Contadora de Películas), Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig has not only gifted to audiences a moving, captivating ode to both movies and the power they have to create and bind communities, but one told–for a change–from the perspective of an imaginative young girl with a talent for storytelling herself.

Reviews

NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT – Review by Jennifer Merin

May 14, 2011October 19, 2024 Jennifer Merin 0 Comments Atacama Desert, Augusto Pinochet, chile, documentaries, jennifer merin, nostalgia for the light, patricio guzman

Patricio Guzman’s beautifully filmed documentary is an exploration of Chile’s remote and pristine Atacama Desert, an arid area that attracts three groups of researchers, each searching for answers to essential human inquiries. With his refined and rather pensive narration, Guzman connects the three apparently disparate searches into a comprehensive and profoundly challenging inquiry into the origins of the universe and of humankind.