The Pearl Button (2015)

Original title

El botón de nácar

Directed by

Patricio Guzmán

Genre

documentary film

Country

Chile, France, Spain

Runtime

1h 22m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.9 of 10 from 76 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

The film connects two stories linked by buttons. One is a shirt button found on a rail used to weigh down bodies of Pinochet's victims dumped in the sea. The other is the button that gave a Yaghan native his English name when he was taken aboard HMS Beagle. It records the last surviving members of indigenous tribes and reflects on memory and those who lost in history.

contemplativepoeticmelancholicslow-burnreflectivehauntingmeditativeelegiac

What happens

The Pearl Button (Spanish: El botón de nácar) is a 2015 Chilean documentary film directed by Patricio Guzmán. It was screened in the main competition section of the 65th Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Silver Bear for Best Script. It won the Lumière Award for Best Documentary at the 21st Lumière Awards. Guzmán has described the work as part of a trilogy with Nostalgia for the Light and third film The Cordillera of Dreams focusing on the Andes. It explores themes common to other Guzmán films, such as memory and the historical past, particularly that of history's losers rather than victors, recording some of the last surviving members of the original Alacalufe and Yaghan tribes. A departure for Guzmán is that it does not focus solely on Chile's past under Augusto Pinochet, as the title was partly inspired by a shirt button discovered during a 2004 investigation by Chilean judge Juan Guzmán on a length of rail used to weigh the bodies of Pinochet's victims dumped in the sea and partly by the button after which the Yaghan native Jemmy Button was named when taken aboard HMS Beagle in 1830. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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