Screening of the film “Pearl Button”

Can the ocean store traces of people, their history, violence and suffering?

“The Pearl Button” (“El pulsón de nácar”) by Patricio Guzmán is one of the most unusual film essays on the memory of water. The Chilean director takes us through Patagonia — a land of fjords, islands, glaciers and the ocean — creating a story in which nature ceases to be just a landscape. Water becomes a living archive in this story. Guzmán weaves two stories that divide decades, and combines the title button.

The first leads to the indigenous people of Patagonia — peoples who have lived in close contact with water for centuries, whose world was almost annihilated by colonization. The second takes us back to the days of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and the history of political prisoners who were murdered and their bodies dumped in the ocean.

“Pearl Button” combines documentary, history, cosmology, nature and politics. It is a film meditation on the relationship between man and landscape and the question of whether places can hold the memory of those who inhabited them.

The film will be preceded by the introduction of Anna Nacher, professor at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts of the Jagiellonian University, researcher of media art, environmental humanities, sound practices and digital culture.