Chile on the big screen

The film premiered in Chile in August

The film premiered in Chile in August

This month The 33, the long-awaited film about the 2010 mine rescue in northern Chile, opens in the United States, and nine survivors of the accident have filed suit against their lawyers, charging that they were cheated out of their share of proceeds from the film.

Following the rescue the miners were showered with gifts and trips, including visits to Disneyland and Israel, and they formed a company which they expected would help them share earnings and manage their finances. According to Luis Urzúa, the group’s leader, the contracts they signed were not what the lawyers said they would be, and they received only 17 percent of the $150 million paid to their organization. Almost all of the miners have suffered health problems in wake of the rescue, especially post-traumatic stress, and several have had trouble finding and keeping jobs. The Guardian has this story on the lawsuit:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/chilean-miners-cheated-out-of-profits-hollywood-film-the-33

And here’s a link to the official trailer for the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOoIBOYqHyw

Another film about Chile, scheduled to be released early next year, is Colonia, a thriller about the infamous German settlement Colonia Dignidad used by the Pinochet dictatorship as a detention and torture center (see earlier posts https://notesontheamericas.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/once-more-colonia-dignidad/ and https://notesontheamericas.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/the-never-ending-colonia-dignidad-horror-show/ ) Some of the settlers, however, have remained in the community and have sought to turn the site into a tourist destination. The New York Times story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/world/americas/villa-baviera-chile-reinvents-itself-for-tourists.html?ref=americas&_r=0

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.