Pampa Ilusión (2001)

Directed by

Vicente Sabatini

Genre

telenovela

Country

Chile

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

In 1934, a fictional mining town in the Atacama Desert faces economic collapse as saltpeter prices drop. The story follows a despotic businessman who searches for his missing daughter while refusing to accept the town's decline. Historical romance and working-class struggles intertwine through themes of classism, betrayal, and misogyny.

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What happens

Pampa Ilusión is a Chilean telenovela produced by TVN. It was written by Víctor Carrasco, Larissa Contreras, María José Galleguillos and Alexis Moreno, and directed by Vicente Sabatini. It is considered part of the so-called Golden Age of Chilean telenovelas. Set in the desolate interior of the Atacama Desert in 1934, and filmed on location in the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works, it classifies both as a historical romance and a working-class melodrama dealing with tyranny, classism and misogyny as principal motives, but given the wide array of characters there are substories centering in themes such as innocence, religious hypocrisy, unrequited love, narcissism, betrayal and prostitution. The main setting is fictional company town whose existence is based entirely on the extraction of saltpeter. The price of saltpeter has declined both due to the effects of the ongoing Great Depression and the invention of synthetic alternatives, and the town faces economic decline and a threat to its existence. The despotic businessman William Clark refuses to accept that his economic prosperity has reached its end, while trying to locate and arrest his estranged daughter. He is searching for a woman, unaware that his daughter is crossdressing and that she uses a male identity in her career as a physician. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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