The Pearl Button

The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar, 2015) is a Chilean documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Patricio Guzmán, it claimed the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlin Film Festival. The film asks what water remembers.

Chile's coastline runs nearly 6,500 kilometres. Guzmán moves between two histories held by the same ocean: the indigenous Patagonian peoples who lived along these shores for millennia and are now nearly gone, and the political prisoners of the Pinochet era whose bodies were dropped from aircraft into the water below. A mother-of-pearl button recovered from the ocean floor passes through both stories.

Guzmán made Nostalgia for the Light — widely considered one of the great documentaries of the past two decades — and The Pearl Button is the second part of an unplanned Chilean trilogy. This one is quieter and harder to shake. Stream The Pearl Button online on iFILM.