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Pictures of voids in black ink

Must the downstream flow for abo: Can one be forgiven for leaving their children in the fight for a higher goal?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

The Chilean Building
Directed by: Macarena Aguiló and Susana Foxley

“These letters should be a continuation of our conversations. I close my eyes and play with you. And I want to open my eyes tomorrow, the 18. August, when you turn nine. … Tell me how you feel! We write to you from the road, and you have to write to us often. Remember to always write letters with black ink, not pencil, because it is not possible to take pencil photos. ”

Is it possible for children to accept that parents leave them? And can parents be forgiven for sacrificing family togetherness to fight for something bigger?

In a sensitive and personal, but insistent and award-winning documentary, director Macarena Aguiló tells of childhood in "The Chilean Building" – a children's collective driven by the revolutionary movement MIR in the 1970 and 80's in Paris and Cuba while her parents fought against Pinochets violent and US-backed dictatorship in Chile.

Central is the void that arises when parents go to war and the children must remain safe. The absence of parents stands as a counterpart to the Cold War's atrocities, and illustrates what it costs to do "the right thing" beyond more measurable sizes such as deaths, incarceration and torture.

In 1975, little Macarena Aguiló was held hostage and tortured by DINA, the Chilean surveillance body under dictator Augusto Pinochet. After the kidnapping, Macarena's mother fled to Paris with her daughter. In the late 70s, the revolutionary movement MIR decided to send exile members back to Chile to fight Pinochet. Macarena's mother was one of the many who joined the fight, leaving the children in a collective known as Proyecto Hogares (Project Home), where 20 adults in the role of "social parents" took care of 60 children. After a while, the collective moved to Cuba, into the "Chilean building". The lack of political results combined with deaths in the home country put a damper on hope and fighting spirit, and the infectious discouragement culminated in a dissolution of the collective.

Lost memories. The film is sensitively edited with great variety in the use of historical clips from children's time in the collective, photographs, letters, drawings and interviews with the now grown children and parents. The biggest impression makes Macarena's childish storytelling voice when she reads aloud from her parents' letter. The mournful guitar music forms a caressing and quiet backbone throughout the film.

The clips of the time in the collective show play and spirit of spirit, pointing to a bright future. Small details testify to closeness and care: An adult hand is inserted into the jet from a water tap, water splashed over baby skin. Children's hands rub dirty clothes clean in milky white wash water, hang up wet clothes on the balcony.

But the adult children also convey memories of isolation, emptiness, longing and anger. The communication with the parents was via letters smuggled out of Chile with microfilm. Gradually they forgot the parents' faces. And when the collective moved from Paris to Cuba, the children underwent a new separation: Here they were sent to a gender-shared boarding school and were allowed to spend time with the social family only on weekends. In the encounter with the Cuban school system, it became clear that the free education of the collective was incompatible with a rigorous education system: The children did not know the meaning of a "word" or "sentence" and ran home when the bell rang without understanding that the teaching should continue after recess.

Gradually they forgot the parents' faces.

In the interviews, the adult children express different attitudes to the after-effects of the project. Some support the parents' choice to leave the children on the grounds that the goal justifies the means. Others are bitter, did not want to grow up without privacy and quiet. A woman confesses to crying in her voice that she does not remember how it was experienced for her to lose her family, even though she had the moment recounted by her mother. The grief of a lost memory has replaced the grief of separation. The children reunited with their parents in Chile at adulthood express their jealousy towards their parents' new partners and children, entities they do not feel involved in.

Today's bonus families. The parents tell of despair and self-denial over the decision to leave their own children. The social parents, in turn, reflect the strong attachment to the children they were assigned to, and the anxiety that filled the children when MIR members returned from Chile with bad news about parents who had fallen into conflict.

Proyecto Hogares was created with the support of a solidarity organization in Belgium, which contributed with a theoretical foundation and raised housing. Through play, music, song and theater the children were to develop attachment to each other and to the reserve parents, and learned to express experiences in artistic form. The goal was to use devotion as an antidote to crisis situations. But the founders foresaw problems: grief over separation, integration difficulties, uncertainty about the children would see parents again, and not least the "double affiliation", that they now had two sets of parents.

It is obvious to draw parallels to modern family structures, where divorces form the basis for new forms of cohabitation. Today's children have to endure separation from parents and relate to bonus parents and bonus siblings, which to some extent can be compared to the Chilean collective's "social family". The question remains: Does a higher goal justify the child's loss of parental involvement? For the child, it does not matter if the goal is the fight against a dictatorship or the parents' pursuit of individual happiness. The result will be the same.

In solution. Macarena wisely presents no conclusions about the heavy dilemma, but the tone of the film emphasizes children's desires. The director's social brother Gerardo has made a beautiful animated film about the collective, which is embedded in the documentary to illustrate the journey from idealism to discouragement. The time of Paris in the spirit of utopia is depicted by an angel dropping naked, sleeping children into the soft opening of the roof of a building. When they wake up, the children discover to their delight that they have had many new siblings and playmates.

In the last animation sequence, a boy wakes up because the walls around him have begun to melt. The boy wakes up a girl and tries to get them out, but the building melts so quickly that they have to fly out of the roof opening. The building sinks into the sea, and the children disappear in each direction. No adults are in sight.

Hilde Susan Jaegtnes
Hilde Susan Jaegtnes
Author and screenwriter for film and television.

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