Littín, Miguel

(1942– )

   Chilean filmmaker, screenwriter, and novelist. Miguel Littín is a noted practitioner of the nuevo cine latinoamericano (New Latin American cinema) along with Glauber Rocha of Brazil, Jorge Sanjinés of Bolivia, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea of Cuba, among others. Born into a family of Palestinian and Greek immigrants in Palmilla, Colchagua Province, in the winegrowing north of Chile, he is one of Latin America’s best-known film directors for his work as well as for his personal odyssey under the regime of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

   He began his artistic trajectory in Chilean theater as a graduate of the Theater School of the Universidad de Chile. His first professional jobs were as director and producer for Chilean television and stage, where he also worked briefly as an actor. During 1964–1967, he worked as an assistant on several films but soon migrated to film direction. His 1969 movie, El chacal de Nahueltoro (released in the United States as The Jackal of Nahueltoro), chronicles the horrific crimes and eventual redemption of a murderer. The film earned its director the attention of the critics and the public alike and remains one of his best-known works.

   In 1970 he was appointed the director of Chile Films, the national film production company, by president Salvador Allende Gossens. During his tenure, he made weekly newsreels and completed two other films, Compañero presidente (1971, Comrade President) and La Tierra Prometida (1972, released in the United States as The Promised Land), for which he also wrote the scripts. La Tierra Prometida, which was begun in Chile but had to be finished abroad, tells of the brief socialist government in Chile in 1932. Soon after the ouster of Allende Gossens by the military in 1973, Littín went into exile first in Cuba and then in Mexico. In exile he went on to direct and write the script for such well-known movies of the period as El Recurso del Método (1978, released internationally as Recourse to the Method), based on the novel by the same title by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier; Actas de Marusia (1975, released in the United States as Letters from Marusia); and Alsino y el Cóndor (1982, released in the United States as Alsino and the Condor). All these films brought the young director great international acclaim.

   In Actas de Marusia, Littín returns to Chilean history, this time in filming the 1907 rebellion of a mining town, an event that ended in the town’s destruction. The film was based on the novel by the same title by Chilean writer Patricio Manns, who reportedly had based his work on eyewitness accounts. The movie was enormously successful abroad and won its director a nomination as Best Movie at the Cannes Film Festival and as Best Foreign Movie at the Oscars. Alsino y el condor, also nominated for Best Foreign movie at the Oscars in 1983, was an ambitious Cuban-Nicaraguan-Costa Rican-Mexican production loosely based on the novel Alsino, by the Nicaraguan writer Pedro Prado. Littín filmed it in Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution as an allegorical tale of a popular guerrilla movement rising against a dictatorial government. Some hailed it for its use of poetic imagery and magic; at one point, the young boy of the title turns into a condor. Others condemned it as an example of heavy-handed political propaganda.

   Littín had already earned a significant place among Latin America’s filmmakers when in 1985 he set out on a project that has earned him almost mythical status in the continent. In 1985, after discovering his name on a list of 5,000 people banned from returning to Chile by Pinochet Ugarte, he decided to risk the return in order to document life under the regime. Posing as a Uruguayan businessman, he conducted three European camera crews into the country. For six weeks, Littín, his Dutch, Italian, and French crews, joined by six Chilean crews staffed mostly by young people, filmed with impunity throughout the length of Chile, at one point even filming inside the presidential palace. The work resulted in a four-part documentary for television and a movie released in 1986 as Acta General de Chile (General Letter from Chile). The works documented interviews with victims of detention and torture, relatives of desaparecidos, and other citizens working covertly in opposition to the government in keeping alive the memory of enemies of the regime, such as the poet Pablo Neruda, whose home was then kept closed to the public by the junta. Other highlights include an interview with an opposition leader, recuperating in a clandestine hospital after being rescued from a public hospital following an assassination attempt. The work concludes with a reenactment of the last hours of President Allende Gossens’s last stand in the presidential palace.

   The daring incursion received even greater publicity when the Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez—who has said he heard the details of the story from Littín himself—opted to write an account of the incursion, published in 1986 as La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile. Told as a first-person account by the García Márquez—who in his early years had worked as a journalist—it completed the work of thoroughly embarrassing the Pinochet Ugarte regime. To date, La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile has been translated into all major European languages, as well as Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Japanese, Korean, and Persian—testimony to García Márquez’s popularity and his status as a perennial best seller worldwide. It was no doubt the international aspect of the incident that reportedly led to the burning of 15,000 copies of the first Spanish edition in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1986, allegedly under orders by Pinochet Ugarte himself.

   With the return of democracy, Littín returned to Chile, where he located his film Naufragos (1994, released in the United States as The Shipwrecked), an exploration of the effects of the years of military junta on Aron, a Chilean exile whose father had died while he was away and whose brother remains among the missing. His latest films have returned the director to his Palestinian roots. In the 2001 documentary Crónicas palestinas: Los caminos de la ira (Palestinian Chronicles: Paths of Anger), he examines the Middle Eastern conflict through the perspective of a child engaged in rock throwing against Israeli tanks. His 2005 film, La última luna, posits the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian solidarity through the story of a young Palestinian, Soliman, and his friendship with a young Jew, Jacob, as they attempt to build a house; the story is set in Turkish-occupied Palestine in 1918. As is customary, Littín wrote the scripts for his latest films and in La última luna worked with his son, Miguel I. Littín-Menz, acting as director of photography. A published novelist, Miguel Littín has earned accolades internationally in the Cannes, Moscow, and Venice Film Festivals, as well as recognition from the Cuban Fundación de Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, of which he is a founding member. He also holds an Ariel, Mexico’s leading film award.

   Miguel Littín lives in Chile and continues to work on the project that first moved him to return to Chile clandestinely: “recuperar la patria por dentro” (recover the homeland from the inside). His latest film, Isla 10, tells the story of an infamous detention camp of the Pinochet Ugarte era, Dawson Island, in southern Chile.