It is not true that time heals everything. Adriana Rivas, who was a close collaborator of the head of the DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), the secret police force of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, will be extradited to Chile to answer for her crimes. The news has been making headlines on the multinational news channel teleSUR these days.
Chilean filmmaker Lissette Orozco uses all her resources, a dynamic camera, skype, cell phones and selfies to immerse herself in an investigation about the past and the intimacy of her aunt Adriana, a faithful collaborator of the most repressive body of the Pinochet government: the DINA. This is how the film El pacto de Adriana came to life.
Orozco proposed (and is able) to expose on camera the inner world of all those involved. The characters revealed their two faces - or more. Some ask for justice and others, at the very moment, revered Pinochet. The emotional recreation is sustained with evidence, files, photos, and first hand testimonies. The story told about Adriana impacts and moves from intimate feelings to the discovery of dark moments in her life, to her complicity and real and conscious involvement.
In Havana, we saw the documentary at the Havana Film Festival. The film touched many: the public, critics and jury agreed and granted it one of the Coral Prizes. The documentary demonstrates a vocation to participate, from the cinema, in the development of ideas, conflict descriptions and the social debates of the country. Memory, as recovery and search, finds a creative process in cinema, no matter if it is fiction or documentary. It deals with a chapter of the most recent history of Latin America that combines personal narrative and poetic resources.
Instinct and the awareness that if these events were not filmed, if what is known and lived is not recounted, they could be erased. Even though the images exist, the testimony, the memory is evoked (summoned?) again and again.
The impact, through the argument conveyed, goes from the feeling to the discovery of dark moments of society and then is connected with today’s realities that, in some cases, illustrate political practices and ideological approaches. We do not know (it is still unknown) how far Pinochet’s ideas have penetrated and how many of them are still alive in Chile. Perhaps, the Chilean awakening began, little by little, and the film El pacto de Adriana could have been –I want to think so– a preview announcing a meeting with the truth, which works as a liberation mechanism.
There is a direct and stimulating relationship between new technologies and cinema. Lissette Orozco knows this, she appropriates all the latest ICT devices, turns them into a living memory, a simple memory stick, to carry a considerable amount of news, photos, recordings, documents, among others. They contain not only the discovery of the real Adriana, who will return, in another aspect of reality, to face facts and truths in a sort of epilogue of an extremely intense and harsh conflict.
