Movies

The great Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán does not grapple with the idea of eternity in his new picture, “The Cordillera of Dreams.” He sits with it, patiently. He considers it through metaphor, as his camera slowly considers the chain of Andes Mountains that makes up the cordillera of his movie’s title.Drone shots are overused in movies, often predictably so; this sublime film, though, abounds in great, distinctive ones. Guzmán’s lens flies the way you would wish your own eye could, unveiling incredible natural beauty and revealing secrets: a labyrinth of gorges for instance. The filmmaker’s narration nuzzles up to the metaphysical, and frequently anthropomorphizes the mountains that practically seal off Guzmán’s homeland. But given his own story and the story this picture needs to tell, the movie toggles between heights and depths.[embedded content]Guzmán left Chile in the 1970s. As depicted in this account, he exiled himself to Cuba practically carrying reels of film under his arms. Those reels became his signature work, the acclaimed documentary The Battle of Chile, a searing chronicle of the coup that felled Salvador Allende Gossens and culminated in Augusto Pinochet’s fascist rule. Guzmán did not return to his homeland for decades, and one of the sites he visits in this film is his childhood home in Santiago, the facade of which seems immaculately preserved. But the house has no roof, a cue for one of the movie’s drone shots.“Santiago receives me with indifference,” muses the filmmaker, whose voice is heard throughout but who is never seen except in archival footage.Memory and loss are interwoven with an activist sense of lineage. (The movie, which won best documentary at Cannes last year, is the last part of a trilogy; the prior pictures in it, “Nostalgia for the Light” and “The Pearl Button,” are in a similar mode.) Guzmán interviews writers and artists who remained in Chile after he departed. One of them, recounting the propaganda of the day, chillingly recalls how “The Left became a demon that had to be eliminated,” a state of affairs that evokes both a distant past and our immediate present. Guzmán eventually settles in with Pablo Salas, a documentarian whose archive of footage in different film and video formats is fascinating.Once Guzmán starts discussing how Pinochet and his cronies used “the Chicago model” to bring their country to economic ruin, you may think, given the depredations these figures committed, that he’s talking about Al Capone. Except he’s talking about the American economist Milton Friedman, of the University of Chicago, whose prescriptions Pinochet followed. “The Cordillera of Dreams” is a beautiful film about nightmares that have yet to end.The Cordillera of DreamsNot rated. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. More

SEOUL, South Korea — Much of the world knows South Korea by its cultural products, including its increasingly popular movies, TV dramas and K-pop performers like BTS and Psy. Now the country has received once-unthinkable validation of its artistic achievement: a best-picture Oscar.On Monday, the director Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” a genre-defying film about class warfare, won that award and three other Oscars, including best director. It was a historic moment for both the Oscars and South Koreans: “Parasite” was the first ever foreign language film to win the top Academy Award, and for South Korea, it was a moment of collective national pride.In office buildings in downtown Seoul, where people were watching live streams of the awards ceremony, cheers rang out on Monday morning. The South Korean president kicked off his staff meeting with a round of applause for the director. Local media sent out news flashes.“‘Parasite’ wins four Oscars, including best picture, and rewrites the 92-year history of Oscars!” read a banner news alert on the home page of the national news agency, Yonhap.South Koreans expressed surprise and gratification over the honors.“Frankly, I haven’t had high expectations because I thought they made conservative choices when selecting Oscar awards,” said Baek Young-hoon, 50, a South Korean movie fan, referring to the longstanding dominance in Hollywood of white filmmakers focusing on stories about white people. “So this comes as a great pleasant surprise to Korean people. We have been longing for global recognition of our movies at the Academy Awards.”“Bong Joon Ho and his ‘Parasite’ made me proud of being Korean,” said Kim Ki-nam, 28, a seller of smartphone accessories in Seoul, calling it a “Korean film winning an Oscar with an all-Korean cast and with a Korean tale!”As soon as “Parasite” hit the screens last May, it resonated with South Koreans because it used a masterful mix of comedy, satire and violence to describe one of the country’s biggest social and political issues: widening income inequality and the despair it has generated, especially among young South Koreans.“People around the world could relate to the polarization it describes,” said Huh Eun, a retired college professor in Seoul and a fan of Mr. Bong’s films. “The film was an extended metaphor for how the deepening rich-poor gap in advanced capitalist societies breeds blind hatred and crimes.”In the movie, a poor family living in a stifling semi-basement home uses subterfuge to get various jobs from — and feed off — a rich family in Seoul. Hence the movie’s name.The film touched nerves among South Koreans because of its depiction of the squalor and exorbitant housing prices the poor face in the country’s congested capital city, and the deepening fatalism among the have-nots over their inability to climb the social ladder.The gap and alienation between the so-called gold spoon and dirt spoon fueled a recent scandal involving the country’s justice minister, who was accused of using his influence to help his children get into prestigious colleges. The minister, Cho Kuk, resigned after weeks of public uproar, and President Moon Jae-in apologized to young South Koreans over the country’s growing economic inequality.Mr. Bong’s film proves that a story that examines the struggles of ordinary South Koreans could strike a chord around the world because of the inequalities that afflict many societies.“Miracle!” Woosang Lee, a Korean in Vancouver, Canada, wrote on Twitter. “I am happy and proud to be Korean. I have never imagined that this kind of thing would come.”Another Twitter user said it “feels surreal to see a movie in your first language earn this much prestige from a Western audience.”The Korean Peninsula was divided into North and South Korea by foreign powers against the Koreans’ will at the end of World War II. That history left both Koreas with a deep fear of being ignored.Although South Korea has transformed itself from a war-torn economic basket case into one of the economic powerhouses of Asia, it still nurses a perpetual hunger for international recognition. One of the country’s pet grievances remains that its scientists and writers have yet to win a Nobel Prize.In South Korea, athletes, artists and entertainers have been looked down on as pursuing inferior professions. Mr. Bong was among hundreds of artists, writers and filmmakers who had been deemed uncooperative and blacklisted by the government under a former president, Park Geun-hye, who was impeached.But it was South Korean athletes, filmmakers and other artists who helped put South Korea on the map by winning Olympic gold medals and professional golf trophies and by going viral on global social media with K-pop music, videos and films.South Korean films have won awards in major international festivals since 2002. (“Parasite” itself won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May and the Golden Globe for best foreign film last month.)But until now, an Academy Award had proved elusive.“It’s a little strange, but it’s not a big deal,” Mr. Bong told an interviewer last year, when asked why no Korean film had ever been nominated for an Academy Award despite the country’s outsize influence on cinema over the past two decades. “The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.”On Sunday night in Hollywood, the Oscars were local no more.In Seoul, word of the honors for Mr. Bong was celebrated by everyone from the American ambassador to President Moon, who started his presidential staff meeting on Monday with a clapping of hands for the director and “Parasite.” He later thanked Mr. Bong for “instilling pride and courage in our people.”“‘Parasite’ has moved the hearts of people around the world with a most uniquely Korean story,” he said. “It reminds us of how touching and powerful a movie can be.” More

Joaquin Phoenix capped off a strong awards season by winning an Oscar for his performance in “Joker.” This was his first Academy Award and fourth nomination. After he took the stage, he gave an emotional speech and riffed on several topics, including oblique references to meat-eating, past mistakes and forms of societal inequality.[embedded content]Here is the full speech:Hi. Stop. Hi. God, I’m full of so much gratitude right now, and I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees or anyone in this room, because we share the same love, the love of film and this form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don’t know what I’d be without it. But I think the greatest gift that it has given me, and many of us in this room, is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless. I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively and I think at times we feel or are made to feel that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality. I think whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity.I think that we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world and many of us, what we’re guilty of is an egocentric worldview, the belief that we’re the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. And I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something to give something up.But human beings, at our best, are so inventive and creative and ingenious and I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment. Now, I have been — I’ve been a scoundrel in my life. I’ve been selfish, I’ve been cruel at times, hard to work with and ungrateful, but so many of you in this room have given me a second chance and I think that’s when we’re at our best, when we support each other. Not when we cancel each other out for past mistakes, but when we help each other to grow, when we educate each other, when we guide each other toward redemption. That is the best of humanity. I just — I want to — when you — when he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric. He said, “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.” Thank you. More