My Imaginary Country – March 26th
Film at 6:30pm – Wednesday, March 26th
Room 137, Isenberg School of Management
UMass Amherst
My Imaginary Country
(2022, Patricio Guzmán, Chile, 83 min, in Spanish w/ English subtitles)
One day, without warning, a revolution exploded. It was the event that 80-year-old master documentarian Patricio Guzmán had been waiting for and working toward all his life: a million and a half people in the streets of Santiago, the Chilean capital, demanding justice, education, health care, and a new constitution to replace the strident rules imposed on the country during the Pinochet military dictatorship. Urgent and topical, My Imaginary Country features harrowing front-line protest footage and interviews with the dynamic activist leaders who are bringing about a regime change. Guzmán powerfully connects Chile’s complex, bloody history to contemporary revolutionary social movements and the election of a popular new president.
Film Screening
Wednesday, March 26th
Free and open to the public
Introduced by Adriana Pitetta (Assistant Professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke)
Co-Sponsored by:
\
Adriana Pitetta
Assistant Professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke
Adriana Pitetta’s interests range widely from Latin American literature and cinema to Afro Uruguayan history and culture, gender and sexualities, cultural consumption studies and political movements. At this point in her academic research, she is particularly interested in the transformation and internal dynamics of social and political movements in their relationship with activism and cultural production during the post-post-dictatorship period in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Her dissertation manuscript, Grey Pedagogies: subjectivities, militancies and sadisms in the Southern Cone cultural production, addresses some of the current discussions in Latin American, and more specifically, Southern Cone Studies, on the questions of activism and political theory, political and social movements, subject theory as well as gender and sexualities. Her dissertation explores how the historical events concerning leftwing politics (specifically Marxist and socialist parties), guerrilla warfare and State terrorism in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay that took place during the sixties and seventies, resonate with different cultural expressions (from the end of the sixties until this decade) such as fictional and non-fictional film, blogs, novels and testimonies. She also explored how the effects of that post-dictatorship cultural production can reshape our idea of activism in the present.