Synopsis
The Pearl Button is a story about water, the cosmos and us. It starts with two mysterious buttons discovered at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, near the Chilean coast, with its supernatural landscapes of volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. Through their story, we hear the words of the indigenous people of Patagonia, the first English navigators and political prisoners. Some say that water has a memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.
A word from Tënk
All of Guzmán's work finds its meaning in the expression ''duty of memory''. A kind of injuction to remember, the duty of memory refers to an essential mechanism of reparation. How do we emerge from a broken, shattered, violated history? How to survive the horror? How to accept the world as it is and make it one's own if one inherits an unspeakable, unimaginable, unrepresentable burden?
Guzmàn weaves a spider's web of work around a central point: remember and look. Face the atrocities that were commited. Do not forget your comrades. Do not leave behind the tortured bodies that were thrown in the water. Do not turn your back on the decimated people of Patagonia, those who lived with dignity for centuries in the icy waters of Tierra del Fuego and who were exterminated in some 50 years by barbarians of the North.
''Impunity is a double assassination'', says the Chilean poet Raùl Zurita. The duty of memory is done in parallel with the act of mourning. The recognition - symbolic, political, historical - of the facts is necessary to emerge from the horror. Neither impunity nor forgetting.
Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director
Presented in collaboration with
