After a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Socialist government of Chile on September 11, 1973, the capital’s National Stadium was the scene of the indiscriminate mass detentions of more than 12,000 suspected dissidents, and the brutal interrogations, torture, and executions they underwent. This film is the first in-depth investigation into the chilling events that took place in the stadium. With the testimony of more than 30 witnesses – former prisoners, priests, soldiers, journalists, nurses, and neighbors – this film provides a detailed and moving account of the experiences of those detained in the stadium. This courageous film unearths a part of Chilean history that is still taboo 30 years later. It opens with the 2000 presidential elections held in the stadium, where one of the vote counters who was also a detainee muses on the irony that in people were exercising their democratic rights “in the same place where people were detained and robbed of their freedom.”
Moving back and forth through time, the film juxtaposes historical footage with contemporary interviews with survivors, many of whom are walking the grounds of the stadium, still used for concerts and soccer games, for the first time in three decades. It is they, rather than a faceless narrator, who recount the horrific events that unfolded there, as they recount in detail their daily living conditions, their hunger, fear, confusion, and boredom, their torture sessions, their mistreatment, and their small tactics of symbolic resistance. It is the protagonists’ stories that highlight the moral confusion and essential absurdity of the situation. Many of the soldiers were themselves poor teenage conscripts from the Chilean countryside who were themselves full of fear and remorse for the savagery that was taking place. One speaker who served as a soldier at the Stadium recounted his horror upon finding his own brother among the detainees. Others were deeply implicated in the Stadium’s darkest horrors. One torture victim asks, “How could these people destroy someone, torture someone, and then wash their hands, go home, and hug their children?” Another former detainee recounts how his torturer ended a torture session early in order to catch a movie with his wife.
Perhaps most surreal is the film’s account of the sham by which the tragedy was brushed under the rug by a complicit media and a culture of “chronic amnesia.” This film is an eloquent first movement toward a sincere confrontation with this repressed past. But, as one Chilean journalist wrote, “The strength of National Stadium does not lie [simply] in providing testimony about something so little remembered and discussed… Its strength lies in showing the most terrible, the most noble, and the most vulnerable aspects of human nature.”
"National Stadium" consists primarily of interviews with survivors of the ordeal - who return to the site to recount the brutalities perpetrated by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet - interspersed with newsreel footage and observations by other eyewitnesses. The stories are mostly somber but occasionally uplifting, as when interviewees recall guards who eschewed their customary cruelty to perform rare acts of kindness, or the prisoner's symbolic victory over their captors... Simple in execution but strong in effect, "National Stadium" offers another telling commentary on the extraordinary inhumanity that so often attended 20th-century political conflict. Recommended.
F. Swietek, Video Librarian
AWARDS
Special Jury Award,Santiago International Documentary Festival. December 2001
Saúl Yelín Award, Havana Film Festival. December 2001
Vitral Award, Contra el Silencio Todas Las Voces Festival, México DF. April 2002.
Special Jury Award, Málaga Festival. Spain. May 2002.
Pudú Award. Best Documentary, Valdivia Festival. September 2002.
Best Documentary Award, Human rights film festival, Buenos Aires. Argentina, November 2002.
Best Documentary Award, Biarritz Festival, France ,October 2003.
Best Dcoumentary Award, International Panorama of Independent Filmmakers 2004, Thessaloniki, Greece. October 2004.
PRICE:
Institution: $200.00
Individual: $49.95