Miguel Littín, 80, leaves the headquarters of the Congress in Santiago on Wednesday at a leisurely pace. He looks excited, almost stunned. The veteran filmmaker, a socialist, accepted a moment ago the position of constitutional adviser to draft a new Magna Carta to bury the legacy of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. Being the oldest of the 50 members of the body, he also had the responsibility of offering the inaugural address as provisional president. His words brought everyone to their feet: from communists to republicans, to the extreme right. But the emotional charge that accompanies it goes beyond the ceremony. It is a long standing burden. “I remember when I came here clandestinely and now I am part of the officialdom”, he affirms while turning his gaze towards the historical monument.
The sympathizer of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity had to go into exile after the 1973 coup, at the age of 30. After long years he was able to set foot on Chilean soil again: “I, Miguel Littín, son of Hernán and Cristina, film director and one of the five thousand Chileans with an absolute prohibition to return, was back in my country after 12 years of exile, although still exiled within myself: I carried a false identity, a false passport, and even a false wife,” the book reads. the adventure of Miguel Littín, clandestine in Chileby Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The text, based on conversations between the two friends, recounts the adventures of the Chilean in his secret trip of a month in 1985, where he shot a film in different locations, one of them, the headquarters of the Congress in Santiago.
“I have always been concerned with politics and, at the same time, with art, making the two things one. I came as an electrician in hiding. I was watching and filming with an Italian crew. I remember the deep emotion of being a clandestine in my country after 12 years without knowing anything about it and stepping on Chilean land that is very important to me”, he recalls to EL PAÍS in the gardens of the Congress headquarters in Santiago de Chile. Since those hidden recordings in the middle of the dictatorship, Littín returned to the government building on a couple of occasions together with emblematic communist leaders such as Volodia Teitelboim, Luis Corvalán and Gladys Marín.
The director of the Chilean film classic The Jackal of Nahueltoro (1969) and a two-time Oscar nominee for Proceedings of Marusia (1976) and Alsino and the condor (1983), is not the first time he has entered the political arena. Littín was mayor of his native Palmilla, 86 kilometers south of Santiago, in two periods (1992-1994 and 1996-2000).
When he got on the front panel this Wednesday to proclaim his speech, he raised his right arm: “I am here greeting you all – as you taught us [el poeta estadounidense Walt] Whitman—with the hand high and perpendicular, as a sign of peace, harmony and friendship”. He spoke of love for the country and civic courage. “Let us fight for the agreement, for the peace of the nation, let us be worthy of the task. Otherwise, history will not forgive those who get carried away by passions or revenge from the past, ”he said. The new counselor tells this newspaper that to prepare his harangue, he read the 10 constitutions and “many things by authors and politicians who have not been well appreciated in Chile”, such as Santiago Arcos and Francisco Bilbao, founders of the Equality Society, the first formal organization that brought together liberal intellectuals and artisans in the 1850s.
Littín is part of a Constitutional Council where the main political force is the far-right Republican Party. Regarding the resounding triumph of the faction led by José Antonio Kast, the filmmaker looks towards his own political terrain. “In one way or another we are to blame, there are mistakes that have been made and that must be corrected. We cannot deny that the left has been in a long period of crisis and that it must be overcome, in relation to representativeness (…) We have not overcome a crisis that has to do with the values that we project and that we exhibit in front of a humanity that she is very disoriented ”, he points out. In any case, he takes away from the imbalance of political forces in the organ. “We have always been a minority, with that there is no problem. Our thought is going to be there because it is a strong, robust and experienced thought”, he adds. The new Magna Carta, the socialist argues, must be founded on a great agreement that interprets Chileans in every way.
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