Nostalgia for the Light

Nostalgia for the Light Spanish Nostalgia de la Luz is a documentary released in 2010 by Patricio Guzmn to address the lasting impacts of Augusto Pinochets dictatorship. Guzmn focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanitys past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives executed during the dictatorship. Patricio Guzmn narrates the documentary himself and the documentary includes interviews and commentary from those affected and from astronomers and archeologists.

Nostalgia for the Light opens with a view of a telescope and images of our moon. The narrator, Patricio Guzmn, describes how he came to love astronomy and begins to remember his childhood where only the present moment existed. Soon, Chile became the center of the world as astronomers and scientists flocked to Chile to observe the universe through the thin and clear skies. We next see Guzmn walking in the Atacama Desert, a place with absolutely no moisture, so much so that it resembles the surface of Mars. This desert, and its abundance of history, becomes the focus of the documentary. Because of how dry it is, the desert hosts the untouched remains of fish, mollusks, Indian carvings, and even mummified humans.Astronomer Gaspar Galaz is introduced and comments on how astronomy is a way to look into the past to understand our origins. It is generally a science seeking answers, but, in the process, creates more questions to answer. He comments that science in general, like astronomy and geology, is a look into the past even sitting there having this interview, he comments, is a conversation in the past because of the millionths of a second light takes to travel and be processed. Lautaro Nez relates astronomers endeavors to his own archeologists and astronomers have to recreate the past while in the present by using only a few traces. ........

Source: Wikipedia