The film opens with a hoarse and low voiceover that sounds like Jeanne Moreau’s but it is Carmen Castillo’s: the Chilean director and activist longly relates the way she was expelled from the country in 1973 by the Pinochet dictatorship after the assassination of her husband Miguel Enriquez, leader of the revolutionary movement MIR, right in front of their house in the Santa Fe street. Her voice gets a hold of you and doesn’t leave you anymore: CALLE SANTA FE is the story of her homecoming. A story from a personal point of view as Carmen Castillo also appears on screen, searching for the neighbors that helped her or facing with child memories and ageing shops, families deprived of their descendants and old revolution partners trying to find ways to continue the fight: the very one you could see in foreign televisions reports about Pinochet junta exactions and that can be seen as excerpts in CALLE SANTA FE.
The title of the movie can be seen as a claim of modesty: it is the occasion to reappropriate and describe a neighbourhood. Castillo looks into buying back the house where she lived with Miguel Enriquez and to revive a memory the dictatorship wants to censor. But the project also takes on a larger dimension. This neighborhood is like the whole nation. And the story of Castillo and Enriquez, which was given an important coverage, is a way to connect the individual history to the one of the country.
Emotion was vivid at the movie premiere at the Latina theater in Paris on the 4th of December. So vivid that just a few questions were asked to the director. After more than two hours and a half the audience had to get one’s breath back. CALLE SANTA FE is part of the documentary vein where the point of view and the personal speech are primordial. Such a way implies that the intimate and the collective history are permanently linked: images express the family tragedy or the story of a nation. Qualities swap from one to another: when one gains a political value, the other is fed with mundane details. This is where the movie succeeds but also shows its limits: it’s all about a subtle balance. Castillo must constantly moderate every of her intentions – at the first place her will to transform her ancient house into a mausoleum to the memory of her belated husband. But youth needs less mausoleums than weapons and ideas. Memory sometimes falters when one could have hoped that a powerful art like cinema could have stood up against a dictator who died before having been judged. This was Syberberg’s ambition in his colossal Hitler, A Film From Germany. Humanism makes sometimes forget, like for Straub, like in S21 the Khmer Rouge Death Machine by Rithy Panh, that truth can hardly accomodates with reconciliations.

Antoine Thirion.