The Battle of Chile

Experience one of film history’s most revolutionary documentaries in a stunning new restoration in time for the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile. On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected Chilean government was overthrown in a bloody coup by General Augusto Pinochet’s army. Patricio Guzman and five colleagues had been filming the political developments in Chile throughout the nine months leading up to that day. The bombing of the Presidential Palace, during which Allende died, would now become the ending for Guzman’s seminal documentary The Battle of Chile, an epic chronicle of that country’s open and peaceful socialist revolution, and of the violent counter-revolution against it.

After its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and winning eight Grand Prize awards at other international festivals, when The Battle of Chile came to the United States it was immediately hailed by critics as a “Spellbinding” “epic!”

“The Battle of Chile, Patricio Guzmán’s 264-minute account of the social whirlwind that engulfed Salvador Allende’s socialist government in the early 1970s, is an epic documentary, an openly Marxist analysis and a stunning exercise in “you are there” vérité” (J. Hoberman, The New York Times).

“Great films rarely arrive as unheralded as The Battle of Chile” (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker).

“Not only the best films about Allende and the coup d’etat, but among the best documentary films every made, changing our concepts of political documentary within a framework accessible to the widest audience” (Time Out Film Guide).

In Spanish with English subtitles.

The film is divided into three parts and will be presented with intermissions as such:

2:00 PM: Parts 1 & 2 (184 min runtime plus 15 min intermission between)

5:27 PM:  Intermission

5:45 PM: Part 3 (78 min)

Tickets: $15 for all three parts (Members from $10) | Under 25? Get your FREE Bronze membership