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As a director, I believe that all different kinds
of documentary filmmaking are important.
With only a small camera an amateur filmmaker,
or a relative of the victims,
can get up close to, or right beside,
a mass grave site or the grave itself;
photographing it that way
is just as valuable as work done by a professional.
In the Atacama Desert, Violeta Berríos,
one of the women who are still searching
for their loved ones’ remains,
was in close contact with the archeologists,
and she learned to distinguish
an irregular burial site in the desert.
When there is a subtle change in elevation, either lower or higher,
there may be something there, but not if it is flat.
And if you start to dig and there are, for example,
30 centimeters of very hard rock, then there is no point continuing.
But if the earth is easier to move, then it has possibilities,
and they mark it with some stones.
And then, the next day they come with small garden shovels
and they start to make a hole, and if they are able to dig deeper,
they come back with bigger shovels and with men to help them.
So I believe that filming exhumations
and mass grave sites is absolutely essential,
and that this fundamental task belongs to amateurs,
to the relatives,
and to young people who are there on site,
not necessarily to the professional filmmaker
who is more likely based in the capital,
rather than in the distant provinces
where the remains of the dead are located.
That experience left a deep impression on me.
All of the photographs that these women showed me
were taken by relatives and non-professionals,
people from nearby towns and from these photos
you can make a documentary film after the fact.
Now, if you are lucky enough to be at an exhumation,
that is incredible.
I have not witnessed one, but I have seen skeletons,
and I have filmed them piece by piece,
where they have traces of the impact of bullets or knives,
guided by an anthropologist who takes me through this journey.
In “The Pinochet Case“ we filmed three bodies in detail
and then we interviewed the relatives.
Documentary film is an essential part of this process
because it serves as a photo album of sorts for the family,
and also because only that way can young people know what happened,
since a moving image is much more convincing than anything else.
For all these reasons documentary films can play a decisive role,
but in particular those made by non-professionals.
Nowadays, anyone can pick up a camera,
and that is a good thing.