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    Antonio Skármeta, Who Wrote of Chile’s Tears and Turmoil, Dies at 83

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    His literary career traced the arc of his country’s modern political journey in stories about ordinary citizens facing repression and arbitrary government.Antonio Skármeta, a Chilean novelist, screenplay writer, playwright and television presenter who captured his country’s affections with warmhearted tales of its suffering and redemption through dictatorship and democracy, died on Oct. 15 at his home in Santiago. He was 83.His death, after a long struggle with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, was announced by President Gabriel Boric Font of Chile on his X account.Mr. Boric paid tribute to the leading role Mr. Skármeta played in his country’s cultural life. He praised Mr. Skármeta “for the life you lived,” adding: “For the stories, the novels and the theater. For the political commitment. For the book show that expanded the boundaries of literature.”Mr. Skármeta’s literary career traced the arc of Chile’s modern political journey in lightly ironic stories that depicted the strategies of ordinary citizens faced with repression and arbitrary government.He lived that journey himself — as an activist supporting the leftist government of Salvador Allende in 1970; as a political exile in Argentina and in Germany after the 1973 coup d’état that inaugurated Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 15-year military dictatorship; as host of a popular television program about literature (the “book show” Mr. Boric mentioned) in the 1990s, after democracy returned to Chile; and as his country’s ambassador in Berlin from 2000 to 2003.His best-known work, the 1985 novel “Ardiente Pacienca” (“Burning Patience”) — the story of a postal worker who befriends Chile’s national poet Pablo Neruda and used the friendship to woo a young local woman — illustrated a method Skármeta typically used: weaving real-life figures and disasters with fictional characters who must cope with them, often with bumbling but very human ineptitude.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Victor Jara Killing: Ex-Chilean Soldier Arrested in Florida

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      Pedro Barrientos, 74, is accused of killing the popular Chilean singer in 1973. In a civil case, Mr. Barrientos was accused of bragging about shooting Mr. Jara twice in the head.A former Chilean Army officer accused of torturing and killing the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara and others during the bloody aftermath of a 1973 military coup was arrested in Florida, officials announced Tuesday.The former officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, 74, who moved to Florida in 1990, is wanted in Chile for the extrajudicial murder of Mr. Jara at a Chilean sports stadium. There, Mr. Jara and other dissidents had been detained after the coup on Sept. 11, 1973, that toppled the country’s president, Salvador Allende, and thrust Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power.Federal immigration officials and local law enforcement officers arrested Mr. Barrientos on Oct. 5 during a traffic stop in Deltona, Fla., about 30 miles southwest of Daytona Beach, according to a news release published on Tuesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Mr. Barrientos is in ICE custody, officials said.“Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens,” John Condon, a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division in Tampa, said in the news release.Mr. Jara, who has been described as the “Bob Dylan of South America,” was a popular singer who hailed from the Chilean countryside and sang tales of poverty and injustice.He had supported the Allende government and was a member of Chile’s Communist Party when he was arrested at the State Technical University alongside hundreds of students and faculty members.Three days after his arrest, Mr. Jara’s bullet-riddled body was found outside a cemetery alongside those of four other victims. Before he was killed, soldiers smashed his fingers with their rifle butts and mockingly told him that he would never play guitar again.Mr. Barrientos’s arrest comes more than seven years after a federal jury in a civil case found him liable for Mr. Jara’s death and awarded $28 million in damages to the singer’s family, which had brought the case under a federal law that allows the victims of overseas human rights violations to seek redress.A former Chilean soldier testified in court that Mr. Barrientos had bragged about having shot Mr. Jara twice in the head.“He used to show his pistol and say, ‘I killed Víctor Jara with this,’” the soldier, José Navarrete, testified.A federal court revoked Mr. Barrientos’s U.S. citizenship in July based on a sealed complaint brought by the Department of Justice’s immigration litigation office.“The court found that Mr. Barrientos willfully concealed material facts related to his military service in his immigration applications,” the ICE news release said.It was unclear whether extradition proceedings for Mr. Barrientos were underway. The federal authorities could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday night, and it was unclear if Mr. Barrientos had retained a lawyer.Mr. Barrientos was the latest former Chilean official to be arrested in Mr. Jara’s killing. In 2018, eight retired military officers were each sentenced to more than 15 years in prison by a Chilean judge over Mr. Jara’s death. More

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      36 Hours in Santiago, Chile: Things to Do and See

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      10 a.m.
      Hike a city-center hill
      Clear a sore head with a sharp ascent up Cerro San Cristóbal, a green islet of native trees and plants in the city center. At 10 a.m., the cable car opens, getting you to the top in under 10 minutes (a hop-on, hop-off day ticket costs 7,900 pesos and includes the funicular railway and shuttle buses within the 1,821-acre Parque Metropolitana). If you’d rather do the hour-long hike, start at the Pedro de Valdivia Norte entrance. As you climb, enjoy panoramic views of the city and mountains, incongruously punctured by the 980-foot, needle-like Gran Torre Santiago, South America’s tallest building. Your reward at the summit is a mote con huesillo (around 2,500 pesos), a refreshing, sweet juice containing a rehydrated peach and a handful of corn, available from the many stands at Estación Cumbre. To descend, take the funicular down the far side, leaving you in Bellavista — and just a block from La Chascona, the poet Pablo Neruda’s quirky home. More

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      ‘The First Year’ Review: Allende’s Rule in Chile

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      The French-language version of a 1971 documentary by Patricio Guzmán is an extraordinary document of a nation in transition.A few years before Patricio Guzmán directed his tripartite masterpiece, “The Battle of Chile,” about the events leading to the C.I.A.-backed military coup that toppled the socialist government of President Salvador Allende in 1973, the Chilean filmmaker made “The First Year”: an account of the inaugural 12 months of Allende’s rule. Guzmán traveled through Chile, interviewing the working class about Allende’s socialist policies and accumulating a crackling portrait of hope and incipient change.The French filmmaker Chris Marker saw the documentary in 1971 and decided to help show it in France, enlisting numerous actors, including Delphine Seyrig, to dub the Spanish dialogue in French. That version, arriving this week in a sparkling restoration at Anthology Film Archives, is a remarkable document not only of a fleeting moment of historical promise, but also of an earnest gesture of international solidarity.Guzmán’s documentary is a people’s microhistory of a nation in transition. He talks to Indigenous peasants about Allende’s land-redistribution programs, miners and factory workers about the nationalization of resources that were being exploited by American business, fishermen about policies designed to liberate them from predatory middlemen. Guzmán’s camera is dynamic, probing faces and gazes with curiosity, and his interviewees are forthright. The film throbs with jubilant energy, culminating with Fidel Castro’s visit to Chile in 1971.To this capsule of a time and place, Marker adds framing context for a French audience, summarizing the colonial history of Chile in a pithy prologue. This sense of a dual perspective permeates the film: The faint audio of the Spanish interviews mingles with the French dub, like a whispered dialogue, simultaneously local and global in its address.The First YearNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wild Life’ Review: Their Land Is Our Land

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      This documentary looks at the efforts of Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and Douglas Tompkins to preserve stretches of land in Argentina and Chile.“Wild Life,” the latest eco-conscious documentary from the filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo,” “Meru”) is a rickety helicopter tour of a fascinating marriage; nearly every scene makes you want to stop and explore in more detail. Things move fast with barely a beat of introduction. Those unfamiliar with the American philanthropists Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and her husband, Douglas Tompkins, may feel in the film’s opening minutes as disoriented as if they’ve been dropped in the wilderness. One catches on that the Tompkins purchased a lot of it: more than one million acres in Argentina and Chile, with the goal of gifting the land back as recognized national parks. The scale of the couple’s ambition teeters on the surreal. Asked in archival footage about a massive snow-flocked volcano on the horizon, Doug casually replies, “Yeah, that came with it.”The film doesn’t do much besides pair snippets of the Tompkins’ biographies with staggeringly beautiful shots of Patagonia’s natural splendors. An early effort to structure the running time around Kris’s first summit of a mountain named in her honor by her husband, who died in 2015, unspools clumsily and is eventually set aside. Chin, a climber himself, joined Kris on the trek and must have decided the footage was less interesting than the story that brought her and Doug to Chile in the first place — an unusual adventure in 20th-century capitalism that begins in 1968 with Doug and his friend Yvon Chouinard embarking on a nine-month van expedition through South America and returning home to each start apparel companies: one would found Esprit; the other, Patagonia.These two mountaineers on the precipice of great wealth were also free-spirited “dirtbags,” a word Chin uses with reverence. Yvon doesn’t disagree, explaining, “If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent.” Yvon would soon hire a teenage Kris to work at Patagonia as an assistant packer; she rose to become chief executive. In her 40s, Kris met and married Doug, completing the loop.Chin and Vasarhelyi, married themselves, understand the unity and isolation couples experience when spurred by a shared goal. The details of negotiating this staggering land donation with Chile’s former president Michelle Bachelet include a moment of suspense that’s hard to follow. (The filmmakers seem too shy to ask questions about costs and legal clauses.) But what is clear is the Tompkins’ twin passions for nature and romance, which merge in the metaphors Kris uses to describe her husband’s effect on her life: “You get hit by lightning,” she beams, adding later, “Once, I was a pebble in a stream. Not anymore.”Kris and Doug’s moving love story should be the emotional foundation of the documentary, but it’s edited in a bit too late. Paradoxically, however, we also crave more scenes of their individual transitions from bohemians to business titans. We’re tantalized by a glimpse of Patagonia meetings held barefoot and cross-legged on the corporate carpet, an allusion to Yvon and Doug’s competition to run the most ethical company (though there’s no need for the klutzy needle-drop of the Tears for Fears hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”), and a hasty mention of Doug’s efforts to course-correct the environmentally destructive fast-fashion industry with a 1990 Esprit advertisement asking mall rat teenagers whether their clothes are “something you really need.” I’d watch a real-time documentary on just that next board meeting.Wild LifeRated PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Imaginary Country’ Review: Chile in Revolt

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      Patricio Guzmán, Chile’s cinematic conscience, chronicles the uprising that shook the country starting in 2019.The most powerful images in “My Imaginary Country” are of the demonstrations in the streets of Santiago, Chile, that began in October 2019. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans took to the streets, at first to protest a subway fare increase, and eventually to demand sweeping changes to the nation’s economic and political order. They were met with tear gas, baton charges and plastic bullets aimed at their eyes. Some fought back with cobblestones chiseled from the street, which they hurled at the police.To watch scenes like that in a documentary film — or, for that matter, on social media — is to experience a strong sense of déjà vu. What happened in Santiago in 2019 and 2020 feels like an echo of similar uprisings around the world; in Tehran in 2009 (and again this week); in Arab capitals like Tunis, Damascus and Cairo in 2011; in Kyiv in 2014; in Paris at the height of the Yellow Vest movement in 2018. Those episodes aren’t identical, but each represents the eruption of long-simmering dissatisfaction with a status quo that seems stubbornly indifferent to the grievances of the people.Accompanying the exhilaration that these pictures might bring is a sense of foreboding. In almost every case, these rebellions ended in defeat, disappointment, stalemate or worse. The buoyant democratic promise of Tahrir Square in Cairo has been smothered by a decade of military dictatorship. Ukrainian democracy, seemingly victorious after the Maidan “revolution of dignity,” has since faced internal and external threats, most recently from Vladimir Putin’s army.Jehane Noujaim’s “The Square” and Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Winter on Fire” are excellent in-the-moment films about Tahrir and Maidan, and “My Imaginary Country” belongs in their company. But it also has a resonance specific to Chile, and to the career of its director, Patricio Guzmán, who brings a unique and powerful historical perspective to his country’s present circumstances. He has seen events like this before, and has reason to hope that this time might be different.Guzman, now in his early 80s, can fairly be described as Chile’s biographer, and also its cinematic conscience. His first documentary, footage from which appears in this one, was about the early months of Salvador Allende’s presidency, which began in an atmosphere of optimism and defiance in 1970 and ended in a brutal U.S.-supported military coup three years later. Guzman’s account of Allende’s fall and the repression that followed is the three-part “Battle of Chile,” which he completed while exiled in France, and which stands as one of the great political films of the past half-century.More recently, in another trilogy— “Nostalgia For the Light,” “The Pearl Button” and “Cordillera of Dreams” — Guzman has explored Chile’s distinct cultural and geographical identity, musing on the intersections of ecology, demography and politics in a mode that is lyrical and essayistic. In “My Imaginary Country” he cites the French filmmaker Chris Marker as a mentor, and they share a spirit of critical humanism and a habit of looking for the meaning of history in the fine grain of experience.While this is a first-person documentary, with the director providing voice-over narration, it expresses a poignant humility and a patient willingness to listen. Guzman interweaves footage of the demonstrations into interviews with participants, most of them young and all of them women.This revolution, which culminated in the election of Gabriel Boric, a leftist in his 30s, to Chile’s presidency and a referendum calling for a new constitution, arose out of the economic frustrations of students and working people. But Guzman and the activists, scholars and journalists he talks to make clear that feminism was always central to the movement. They argue that the plight of poor and Indigenous Chileans can’t be understood or addressed without taking gender into account, and that the equality of women is foundational to any egalitarian politics.“My Imaginary Country” ends with a new constituent assembly — including many veterans of the demonstrations — meeting to write a new constitution that they hope will finally dispel the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s long dictatorship. After the film was completed, voters rejected their first draft, a setback to Boric and to the radical energy Guzman’s film captures and celebrates. Whatever the next chapter will be, we can hope that he is around to record it.My Imaginary CountryNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Whether Dancing or Still, the Body in ‘Ema’ Tells the Story

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      In Pablo Larraín’s unsettling film, Mariana Di Girolamo stars as a dancer who finds freedom through reggaeton dance.Ema is the oddest of things: a dancer with a passion for setting things on fire. In “Ema,” Pablo Larraín’s film, the title character has a particular look, too: bleached hair slicked back so severely that it appears to be shellacked to her head. That hairstyle, hard and impenetrable, is like a coat of armor, which makes sense. Ema is made of ice. Until she dances.Set in the coastal city of Valparaíso in Chile, “Ema,” now in theaters and on Amazon and other digital platforms starting Sept. 14, tells the story of a couple, an older choreographer and a younger dancer — Gastón (Gael García Bernal) and Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo) — who adopted but then abandoned a Colombian boy named Polo. The reason they give up the boy turns out to have something to do with fire; he’s fond of it. It’s not hard to draw conclusions about who might have encouraged him.Ema is a member of her husband’s experimental dance company, and it’s no secret that she has lost interest in it — and in him. Her obsession is reggaeton and its dance, which she relishes for its aggressive sensuality; outside of the dance studio with her friends, her body is electric as she lets her limbs fly and her hips shake. Gastón is not impressed. To him, reggaeton is music to listen to in prison, “to forget about the bars you have in front of you.”Their generation gap is apparent as Gastón continues: “It’s a hypnotic rhythm that turns you into a fool. It’s an illusion of freedom.”Moving like a unit: A scene from “Ema,” with choreography by José Vidal.Music Box FilmsIs it? Who is Ema? She gave up her son, but seems to want him back. She’s a seductress who carries — and uses — her body with steely, precise intention. While her inner world is a mystery, it’s clear what reggaeton allows her to feel: free.Dance is the key. But unlike so many films and television series of late, it isn’t a superficial layer tacked onto the story. In “Ema,” Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and the coming “Spencer,” has given dance, or movement, a leading role. It’s also a means to an end that extends beyond conventional choreography: How can dance bring Ema closer to freedom? Whether she is alone or with her friends — a collective body moving as one — her physicality spreads across every scene. And she doesn’t even have to be moving: Her inner vibrations are just as lucid in stillness.Because of that, the film, with its dreamlike score, is something of a dance, too — floating, gliding and then, all of a sudden, turning on a dime. “Ema” is an action film, but not in the conventional sense: The body is the action. And while there is dialogue, words add up to less than the deliberate pacing of each scene and the poetic power of Di Girolamo’s frame.In a magnetic solo at the port, dusky light envelops Di Girolamo’s silhouette as she stands with her back to us and her legs wide apart. Her right arm, bent at the elbow, is raised, her hand in a fist. Rocking her hips, she swings from side to side as her arms open and close. It is hypnotic, but she’s no fool. She’s strong and tenacious; you sense the tension leaving her body through her dance.Di Girolamo in a dance scene at the port in “Ema.”Music Box FilmsAs she picks up the pace, walking with purpose and changing direction, her back undulates and her angled arms carve through the air to an imaginary beat. Moments later, she’s on a carousel ride, but there are echoes of her dance: As she grips her horse’s pole, she sways, dipping from side to side; she’s almost relaxed.Once she stops moving, her expression changes: Her thick brows frame a stony face. She is catlike with the kind of stare that makes you feel invisible; at the same time, she dances as if you were invisible. She’s beyond needing an audience.Di Girolamo is not a trained dancer, though she studied flamenco for a few months as a teenager. Her mother decided she would be better off doing that than being in therapy. “It was literally a therapy for me,” Di Girolamo said in a recent Zoom interview. “It gave me the necessary tools to be empowered and to continue ahead.”But she does love to dance. (Her husband is a D.J.) In “Ema,” she had tools to help her body acclimate to her character: One was the hair, which helped her to see Ema as an energy — like the sun, like fire. “She’s very hypnotic, and in some ways she’s very dangerous or destructive,” Di Girolamo said, “but you also want to be close to her.”“She’s very hypnotic, and in some ways she’s very dangerous or destructive,” Di Girolamo said of Ema, “but you also want to be close to her.”Music Box FilmsThe other was her training. Di Girolamo worked closely with the Chilean choreographer José Vidal, whose company appears in the film. Mónica Valenzuela was also part of the choreographic team, and her focus had more to do with the reggaeton moments. “I think Pablo wanted more of a nasty movement that I wasn’t apparently quite able to find,” Vidal said with a laugh, in an interview. “So she came to add some spice. It’s not like there is phrase one, phrase two — it is a mix of all of the materials.”Vidal’s choreographic approach involved studying Di Girolamo’s mobility: the flexibility of her spine, the range of her arms. He then turned that into a language. “More of a street dance, reggaeton sort of thing,” he said. “But it never came directly from that. My intention was, OK, we’re going arrive there. But we’re going to arrive there coming from an inside place.”The process began with immersive work that helped Di Girolamo to “connect into herself, into her emotions, into her structure,” Vidal said. “How does it feel to move here” — he patted his chest and swayed his shoulders — “and what connects you with each emotion? It was never about making her imitate or repeat something directly.”Vidal on the set. To choreograph for Di Girolamo, he studied her mobility and turned it into a language.via FabulaDi Girolamo also had to blend in with the professional dancers in Vidal’s company. The opening scene features an excerpt from his “Rito de Primavera,” inspired by “The Rite of Spring.” To dance in it, Di Girolamo studied ballet and Pilates. “I don’t have very good posture, so we worked on it,” she said. “I had to understand the limits and the possibilities of my body.”That led her to find Ema’s physicality — her rhythmic, weighted walk and the way she invades space both to intimidate and to get what she wants. “Dance was very important for me to understand how she seduces the other characters,” Di Girolamo said. “It’s the tool she has, and she’s conscious about that tool.”She spent a lot of time on the floor breathing. Vidal called it an initiation into the body, into the movement. In addressing her posture, Vidal focused on opening her chest, which in turn paved the way to showing her tasting freedom, even being vulnerable. There’s a reason the scene at the port feels so fresh and spontaneous.“I remember it was very cold, and Pablo said, ‘Mariana, now you have to improvise a dance scene,’” Di Girolama said. “I was like, what? But I started dancing. I used the same steps of the choreography, but I deconstructed them. I’m not very good at improvisation, but if I have some tools, some things that I know, I can do something with it. I kind of deconstructed the choreography to make a new one.”It wasn’t easy. “I was very nervous,” she said. “It’s like singing. It’s a very personal thing. It’s like a window of our souls.” More

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      BTS Fans Mobilize to Denounce Anti-Asian Jokes Targeting the Boy Band

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      A global outcry fueled by a sketch on a Chilean comedy show reflected a growing sensitivity to racist, particularly anti-Asian, speech.A parody on Chilean television of the Korean boy band BTS prompted an international backlash over the weekend, illustrating the power of the group’s many fans and a heightened sensitivity around the world to racist, particularly anti-Asian, speech.In a short sketch on the show “Mi Barrio,” which aired Saturday on the Mega Channel in Chile, comedians satirized the South Korean supergroup, mocking the Korean language and associating the band’s members with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un.Asked to introduce themselves, the actors portraying the band’s members gave their names as “Kim Jong-Uno,” “Kim Jong-Dos,” “Kim Jong-Tres,” “Kim Jong-Cuatro” and “Juan Carlos.” Asked to say something in Korean, one comedian spoke in accented gibberish.Fans of BTS are legion and fiercely loyal. They quickly came to the band’s defense and linked the jokes to wider issues of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia that have flared since the coronavirus surfaced last year in China.Propelled by these ardent supporters, who call themselves Army, the group has made record-breaking runs at the top of the Billboard charts, released platinum-selling singles and won countless awards around the world. The group boasts the most-ever engagements on Twitter and the most video views in 24 hours on YouTube.While using their power and numbers to promote and defend the group, BTS fans have also demonstrated themselves to be a powerful bloc on other issues. Last year, Korean pop music fans coordinated to embarrass President Donald J. Trump by inflating ticket requests at a campaign rally.At a time of increased anti-Asian rhetoric and violence across the internet and around the world, “Mi Barrio” quickly became the target of a larger antiracism campaign. The trading card company Topps faced a similar backlash last week after releasing Garbage Pail Kids cards that were intended to mock the band but were widely perceived as racist and tone deaf.Not confined to Spanish-language social media and BTS fan accounts, outrage about the “Mi Barrio” episode quickly spread across the web, with the hashtag #RacismIsNotComedy becoming the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in the United States on Sunday night. It was an indication that thousands of people were discussing the term at the same time.“There is NOTHING funny about racism, especially in a time where Asian hate crimes have been rampant around the world. This is disgusting,” wrote one Twitter user.A Chilean BTS fan account with 150,000 followers pushed people to register a formal complaint against “Mi Barrio” with the country’s National Television Council, calling on the regulator to “ensure that racist attitudes and stereotypes are eliminated from Chilean television.”In a statement posted to its Instagram account on Sunday, “Mi Barrio” struck a conciliatory, if not wholly contrite, tone. “We will continue to improve, learn, listen and strengthen our intention: to bring entertainment to families.”BTS has not officially commented on the Chilean episode, but in a statement released in March about increased attacks against Asians, the group said, “We recall moments when we faced discrimination as Asians. We have endured expletives without reason and were mocked for the way we look. We were even asked why Asians spoke in English.”“We stand against racial discrimination. We condemn violence. You, I and we all have the right to be respected,” the message concluded. “We will stand together.”That statement, released on Twitter, has been liked more than two million times. More