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JUSTICE MATTERS

Dawson, Island 10

MIGUEL LITTIN
Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, 2009, 117 minutes, Color and Black & White, film's website

After the 1973 overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, the members of his cabinet were sent to Dawson Island, a naval base in frigid Patagonia. They were imprisoned in a makeshift concentration camp and assigned numbers. Number 10 was Sergio Bilar, whose memoirs are the basis for this powerful docudrama. Chile's submission for the 2009 foreign-film Oscar®, Dawson, Island 10 was actually shot on Dawson Island and includes archival footage of the anti-Allende coup. The movie documents abuse of the prisoners and shows the military’s ludicrous attempts at Orwellian language control, but it also reveals that the inmates developed bonds with their captors, and used their skills in such fields as medicine and architecture to help everyone on the island. When the camp closed in 1974, some of the prisoners were released—only to be targeted later. One of them, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated in Washington in 1976. —Mark Jenkins

In Spanish with English subtitles

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