CHILE: Film Celebrates ‘Swedish Schindler’s’ Gift to Humanity

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

María Cecilia Espinosa

SANTIAGO, Mar 17 2006 (IPS) - Filming of “The Black Pimpernel”, about Swedish ambassador Harald Edelstam, has been taking place in Chile since January. The film focuses on the three months following the Sept. 11, 1973 coup d’etat, when the diplomat saved more than 1,300 people from death or imprisonment.

The film is a Swedish-Danish-Mexican-Chilean co-production. Edelstam, who died in 1989, was posted in Chile from 1971 to 1973, and played a key role helping those persecuted by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) in the wake of the military coup.

Directed by Swedish film-maker Ulf Hultberg, the film’s international cast includes 32 Chilean actors and 1,700 extras. The budget is more than three million dollars, according to Chilean producers Umana Films, who are involved in the project.

“‘The Black Pimpernel’ focuses on a little-known hero of the history of Chile and Sweden,” Sergio Laurenti, executive director of the Chilean branch of Amnesty International, told IPS.

Edelstam “showed a courage that was rare at that time. He was a remarkable person who will inspire many people so that such things may never happen again, and so that individuals may take responsibility for defending human rights,” he added.

Shooting of the film has been under way since Jan. 19 in 36 locations. For the first time, the places where events actually occurred will be used, such as the facade of the Palacio de La Moneda – the seat of government, which was bombed during the coup – , the Uruguayan Embassy and the National Stadium, the biggest torture centre, where 12,000 opponents of the regime were held after the military coup.

In Laurenti’s view, this is “an important effort to recover the memory of those days, which will help many people to realise the brutality of the weeks and months immediately following the coup, when Edelstam was most involved.”

In an interview with IPS, Viviana Díaz, with the Group of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD), emphasised the “rightful honouring of someone who fought to save the lives, not only of Chileans, but of many other Latin Americans who were in our country at the time of the military coup.”

Díaz noted the significance of the film for the generations who have grown up since the coup, “who will discover, 33 years later, the brutality of the military coup in our country, when not even the people who took refuge in embassies were spared, even though the right to asylum is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

The activist considers the film to be “an important and relevant historical record,” because it is “the best way to raise awareness among those who, to this day, refuse to believe why these things happened.” She also said she trusts the historical rigour of the international production, “which has tried to go back in time and investigate in detail, so that people can find out what happened.”

The project is sponsored by the ministry of Culture and Arts, and has the support of the Santiago city government, the ministries of Transport and Foreign Relations, and the National Sports Institute of Chile, among other bodies.

Horacio Donoso, a producer with Umana Films, told IPS that in spite of their request for logistical support from the ministry of Defence, the latter “did not put its resources or infrastructure at the service of the production team.” The army only gave “costume advice, and permission for pyrotechnics in front of the Palacio de La Moneda.”

Donoso, who was born five years after the military coup, said he was well versed in that chapter of Chilean history. “This type of movie, about what happened during the 1973 political crisis, is a contribution to establishing a collective consciousness that this must never happen again in Chile.”

Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist is cast as Edelstam, and Mexican actress Lumi Cavazos, who starred in “Like Water For Chocolate,” portrays Miria Contreras, the personal assistant of Salvador Allende, then president of Chile (1970-1973). The socialist president took his own life in the Palacio de La Moneda, resisting the onslaught of the armed forces.

Nyqvist remarked that his preparation for the role included meeting with Edelstam’s family, and “with several Chileans who were exiled in Sweden, whom Edelstam had saved through through embassy.”

During the scenes filmed in the National Stadium, Hultberg commented that “the spirits of the dead were present among us.” He said that “being able to film in La Monedaàand also in the National Stadium, is a very special and historic event.”

Cristián Campos, a Chilean playing the role of Colonel Jorge Espinoza, a fictitious name for the officer in charge of the National Stadium in 1973, said that it was “an arduous task to enter into the psychology of someone who was so beastly and cruel to his fellow human beings.”

The spools of film will be sent to a laboratory in Denmark for digital imaging work with film archives and photographs of the period. After a year of post-production, the film will be premièred in Europe in the second half of 2007.

In three months of feverish effort on behalf of those persecuted by the dictatorship, Edelstam was able to get 1,300 people out of Chile, including the diplomatic corps of the Cuban Embassy, and 54 Uruguayans detained at the National Stadium.

The Swedish diplomat, born in 1913, issued safe-conducts, drove victims of political persecution from place to place in his own vehicle, visited safe houses and coordinated actions with international organisations.

“The Black Pimpernel” will include an episode in which Edelstam saved the life of a Uruguayan citizen, Mirta Fernández, who had been arrested despite suffering from a serious illness.

After 26 doctors refused to treat her in the embassy, one eventually diagnosed her as “gravely ill”. Edelstam got the officer guarding the embassy to promise that Fernández would enjoy immunity while at the clinic, and then be allowed to return to diplomatic asylum.

Once she was at the clinic, however, the secret police tried to arrest her because she was “on Chilean territory.” However, the ambassador put up resistance, saying she had diplomatic immunity. The police gave Edelstam a beating, but withdrew when threatened with international repercussions.

Edelstam’s actions awakened the hostility of the governing military junta, which declared him “persona non grata” in December 1973, forcing him to leave Chile. The same treatment had been meted out to him in the 1940s, when he was Sweden’s representative in Nazi Germany, and Adolf Hitler also expelled him.

After the film is released, comparisons will perhaps be drawn between Edelstam and Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazi holocaust, and inspired Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List.”