This documentary, whose title is a line from one of Pablo Neruda’s poems, is a snapshot of Chile after two years of military dictatorship. In the agitational Cold War rhetoric typical of Studio H & S, it portrays both representatives of the regime and the victims of the terror, who are beginning to organise themselves as they search for the arrested and disappeared. Walter Heynowski, Gerhard Scheumann and Peter Hellmich had spent several months in Chile in early 1973 to record Allende’s reform efforts as well as the machinations of the far-right forces. Hellmich stayed longer: On 11 September 1973, he managed to film the legendary footage of the bombing of the Presidential Palace, conducted the first interview with General Augusto Pinochet after the coup and filmed political prisoners in the Chacabuco concentration camp in the Atacama Desert. For the extremely risky interviews and filming of “Eine Minute Dunkel macht uns nicht blind”, Studio H & S had to send a West German team – Gerhard Biroth, George Boultwood and Frederico Füllgraf – to Chile. Their true intention behind the transparent pretext of “filming the landscape for the promotion of tourism” and documenting “the economic success of the Pinochet government” remained undetected, as Füllgraf remembers, despite constant surveillance and thanks to all kinds of tricks. This screening is the premiere of the restored and digitized version of the film which was supported by the Förderprogramm Filmerbe (Digitisation of German film heritage funding programme).

Florian Wüst