/ART WEEKLY/FILM-CHILE: Director of Pinochet Film Takes on Opus Dei

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Oct 1 2002 (IPS) - After her acclaimed, thought-provoking documentary ”I Love Pinochet”, Chilean filmmaker Marcela Said is getting ready to tackle another touchy issue: filming the followers of Opus Dei who are travelling en masse to Rome for the Oct 6. canonisation of Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer.

”Opus Dei is an issue that no one in Chile really addresses, about which there is a lot of talk, but no real in-depth discussion. I want to take a good look at it. I like challenges,” said Said at a showing of her Pinochet documentary at the University of Chile’s School of Journalism.

Escrivá de Balaguer is the Spanish priest who founded the influential Catholic lay movement Opus Dei (Work of God).

The socially conservative group has enjoyed the strong backing of Pope John Paul II, who bestowed a ”personal prelature” on the organisation in 1982, making the group’s members accountable not to their local bishops but to the head of Opus Dei – who in turn is accountable only to the Pope.

The group’s critics say Opus Dei is a cult-like organisation, and Escrivá de Balaguer, who died in 1975 and was beatified in 1992, is reviled by socially liberal Catholics.

According to a January Toronto Globe article, Opus Dei ”has been called the Holy Mafia and Octopus Dei, a reference to the power it exerts in the Curia, the 2,500-member Vatican bureaucracy of prelates and trusted laity who govern the Church. A parents’ group has been formed in the United States to retrieve children from its grip.

”Critics accuse Opus Dei of being intensely secretive and elitist, of discriminating against women, recruiting young people without parental approval and exerting powerful mind control over its members, and venerating its founder well in advance of sainthood status.”

Said’s earlier project, ”I Love Pinochet” is a 52-minute documentary shot by the 30-year-old filmmaker, who lives in France, with the aim of ”explaining to Europeans what ‘Pinochetismo’ is.”

The film made its premiere in November 2001. But although it has been broadcast widely in Europe, it has only been shown around five times in Chile, including its first showing in a university setting on Sep 25, at the School of Journalism.

The idea for the documentary came to Said during the 503 days that former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), spent under house arrest in London.

The elderly former dictator was arrested after undergoing back surgery, on the basis of a warrant issued by Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain, who wanted to try him for crimes against humanity. (Some 3,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared at the hands of the security forces under the Pinochet regime.)

The retired general eventually flew back to Chile in March 2000, after he escaped extradition to Spain because he was deemed physically and mentally unfit to stand trial.

While Pinochet was under house arrest in a London mansion, Chileans whose loved ones were the victims of the dictatorship’s human rights violations demonstrated continually in the British capital to demand that he be brought to justice outside of Chile, since he enjoyed parliamentary immunity at home.

But the British capital was also the centre of demonstrations by Pinochet supporters from Chile who travelled back and forth between Santiago and London where, with the backing of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and other conservatives in Britain, they demanded the release of ”the man who saved Chile from communism.”

”It was the Pinochetistas themselves who gave me the title for the documentary, with their T-shirts reading ‘I Love Pinochet’ on top of a red heart,” Said told students who viewed her film at the School of Journalism.

”For most Europeans, being a supporter of Pinochet is like being a follower of (Adolf) Hitler. They couldn’t believe he had so many supporters. They forgot that in the 1988 plebiscite on the presidency, he won the support of 44 percent of the voters,” said the filmmaker.

To help Europeans understand the phenomenon, she decided to enter the world of the ex-dictator’s partisans, who are not only comprised of affluent Chileans who benefited by the military regime, but of people of modest means as well, who remain fiercely devoted to ”Tata” (Granpa), as they fondly call Pinochet.

Said’s ”in” for entering that world was Mónica Salinas, a blonde former model and fervent admirer of Pinochet, who decked herself out in the colours of the Chilean flag – red, white and blue – in the demonstrations in London.

Salinas and her circle of friends, who are into horseback riding and golf, talk freely in the documentary, vindicating the man who ”made Chile number one in Latin America.”

But Said also interviewed Israel Arcos, who lives in a slum neighbourhood in Santiago, where his humble dwelling is tapestried – from the walls to the dining room table – with Pinochet motifs.

Arcos becomes visibly emotional when he listens to old recordings of the former dictator’s voice, and his son gets teary-eyed when he speaks about Pinochet before the camera. His daughter, meanwhile, rails against ”those Communists, who have no love, because they don’t have God in their hearts, and that’s why they hate the General.”

”I love Pinochet” has been repeatedly aired on television in Europe.

But although it received the Grand Prize at the Chilean Festival of Documentary Filmmaking in September, it has been shown only a handful of times in Santiago, and always in non-commercial settings.

Said doubts that it will be released on television here. ”This is a country that is still in the midst of a political transition…where censorship – and, what is worse, self-censorship – continues to reign,” she said.

After taking courses in ”aesthetics” at the Catholic University, Said left Chile for Paris, where she studied ”sociology of communications” at the Sorbonne.

Said, who has Palestinian forebears, is married to a Jewish stage designer from Argentina, who was her main source of support for the project on ‘Pinochetismo’. In fact, it was her husband who helped her buy the digital camera with which she flew from Paris to Chile in 2000.

Later she obtained backing for the project from the Pathe firm in France, and from Imago Producciones in Chile. But she had to sign away her rights to royalties in exchange for a good salary as director.

”The Europeans liked ‘I Love Pinochet’. The documentary is in the style of ‘filming the enemy’. But I was very respectful, and I was not manipulative. I never work with prejudices. I seek issues that give me ideas. I never have a fixed ‘editorial line’,” she told the journalism students.

Armed with these principles, Said will now start filming a documentary on Chilean followers of Opus Dei who will go to Rome for the canonisation of Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of that controversial Roman Catholic Church movement.

Members of Opus Dei are divided into three categories: numeraries, who generally hold postgraduate degrees and live in Opus Dei communities, to which they turn over their incomes; associates, who also take vows of celibacy and obedience but do not live in the organisation’s communities; and supernumeraries, who are not celibate.

The members, who number around 90,000 in 80 countries, are instructed not to tell anyone that they belong to the organisation, although they are not supposed to lie if asked outright.

Said’s new documentary has the backing of the National Fund for the Development of the Arts, a Chilean government agency that finances artistic and cultural projects that compete in contests for the funds.

Thanks to that support, Said will have a team made up of a camera person, a sound recordist and a producer, after having done most of the filming on ‘I Love Pinochet’ on her own.

/ART WEEKLY/FILM-CHILE: Director of Pinochet Film Takes on Opus Dei

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Oct 1 2002 (IPS) - After her acclaimed, thought-provoking documentary “I Love Pinochet”, Chilean filmmaker Marcela Said is getting ready to tackle another touchy issue: filming the followers of Opus Dei who are travelling en masse to Rome for the Oct 6. canonisation of Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer.
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