Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán died in the early hours of Tuesday at a hospital in Paris due to cardiorespiratory arrest at the age of 85, the Chilean Film Academy confirmed.
According to local media, the director had been facing complications for three years as a result of a prolonged illness.
Sources close to the family told EFE that the filmmaker fell ill on Monday in Paris with a high fever and was taken to a hospital, where he died at around 5:00 a.m. local time (0300 GMT) on Tuesday.
A career spanning four decades
Guzmán, who had been based in France for more than four decades, made more than twenty films, most of them documentaries. His best known work is The Battle of Chile (1975-1979), a trilogy that chronicles the turbulent years of the Popular Unity government (1970-1973) and the political destabilization that culminated in the coup against former president Salvador Allende (1908-1973).
Guzmán had to smuggle the film out of Chile because of persecution under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). It went on to become the most widely distributed Latin American documentary in history and a landmark work of political documentary filmmaking worldwide.
The footage used to make the film, which includes on-the-ground interviews and records of some of the most emblematic strikes of that turbulent period, was handed over by filmmaker Chris Marker, who was familiar with Guzmán's earlier work.
Awards and recognition
In 2023, Guzmán received Chile's National Prize for Performing and Audiovisual Arts, cementing his status as one of the most significant filmmakers in the South American country's history.
Among his top honors, Guzmán won the Silver Bear for best screenplay at the Berlinale in 2015 for his documentary The Pearl Button, and the Goya Award for best Ibero-American film in 2022 for The Cordillera of Dreams, the first documentary to win that prize.
That same film also earned him the award for best documentary at the Cannes Film Festival, while his film Nostalgia for the Light won the European Film Award for best documentary in 2010.
