When Antonio Skármeta emigrated to Berlin with his family in 1974, with the assistance of director Peter Lilienthal and a fellowship from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, he brought with him only a few short stories, two half-finished novels, and the screenplay to LA VICTÓRIA, which the German-Uruguayan Lilienthal had filmed in Chile in 1973. Skármeta went on to write more screenplays for Lilienthal, and for Christian Ziewer; the first decade of his exile was shaped by his connection to film. Lacking any practical experience, he learned while on the job—for example, with his first short film, 1978’s AUFENTHALTSERLAUBNIS.
The basic idea is simple: a number of dictatorships were falling at the time, and the emigrants from these countries were able to return home—to Greece, Portugal, Spain, Uganda, and Iraq. Not so the Chileans: they had just arrived, for Pinochet seized power in 1973. In the “Department for Regulatory Affairs” of a police station, people from all over the world meet: some, beaming with joy, to pick up their residency permits; others to receive some exit stamp or other. They have long since become friends, and are now saying goodbye to those forever departing at the airport. The Pan Am airplanes, themselves a nostalgic pictorial element, become the constant symbol of a definitive separation.
Antonio Skármeta weaves these images into the life of the Chilean community, with takes footage from a children’s party in the park of Bellevue Palace, where his two sons are playing drums. Young people become a cheerful recurring element—save a brief excerpt from the feature film AUS DER FERNE SEHE ICH DIESES LAND by Christian Ziewer, in which a father warns his son to start paying attention at school so that he won’t flunk out. The son answers sullenly, “So what? When Pinochet’s overthrown, I’m going back to Chile anyway.” His father admonishes: “That could take a long time, maybe 20 years.” In this way, the tragic dimension of their exile is referenced almost in passing.
A subway train cuts across the image. Then, ascending to street level—from the underground, so to speak—rises a black colossus on a gigantic poster: a caricature of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, “toppled in May 1979”, as an inscription states. Teenagers carry the picture away. Other toppled criminals follow, and in between them are scenes of the immigration office, of goodbyes, of social gatherings, and even a flashback to the time of demonstrations for Salvador Allende’s electoral coalition Unidad Popular, for whom they all fought at some point. We see Chilean community, torn from their own history, before the background of the historical course of time.
These Chileans don’t let their circumstances get them down. Instead, they have brought to Berlin a piece of the enthusiasm with which they supported Allende and his project of democratic socialism. Here they are trying to reinvent themselves here, or to keep developing—like Antonio Skármeta, who first became known as a filmmaker in Germany and then famous as a writer, for his novel “Burning Patience” (adapted in 1994 by Michael Radford into IL POSTINO).
Occasionally Skármeta allows aspects of these Chilean activities to flow into the film in the form of asides. In one instance the talk is of La Batea, the legendary bar in the Krumme Strasse, opened with German help in those years as workplace for many, as meeting point for the resistance, as a piece of home. It still exists today.
The Chilean community wants to spread joy and above all hope—although they know by now that they probably won’t be able to return home for a long while yet.
Antonio Skármeta halts the flow of changing perspectives and bright scenes for a moment of reflection. It is the only point at which a German voiceover can be heard, and it recites a poem by Pablo Neruda, the author’s literary hero: “Exile is round, a circle, a ring. / Your feet travel around, you cross the Earth. It is not your Earth. / The light wakes you, and it is not your light. / The night comes, the stars are not your stars. / You find brothers, but it is not your blood.”
Exile means constant uprooting. Even under comparatively favorable conditions, as Antonio Skármeta conveys in his first cinematic document: for the Chileans, Berlin was more than just a stopover, it was a place where—despite plenty of everyday problems—they could realize their potential, where they found solidarity and could practice it themselves.
Of course melancholic moments surface here, too, especially on the soundtrack, when typical instruments of Chilean folklore, such as the quena, the famous Andean flute, and the charango, a special type of guitar, are heard; both were banned during the dictatorship. But all in all, the basic mood is cheerful; there’s dancing to, among other songs, one of Skármeta’s favorites. This too a facet of the film; the Chilean community wants to spread joy and above all hope—although they know by now that they probably won’t be able to return home for a long while yet. Not even to a neighbouring country, since the Pinochet virus has befallen Argentina and Uruguay, too, and in Brazil a dictatorship has long been in place.
In his cinematic debut AUFENTHALTSERLAUBNIS, Skármeta delivers an impressive picture of the unbroken optimism of Chilean emigrants in Berlin, and of hope as the basic stance of his entire oeuvre.
Peter B. Schumann is a journalist with a focus on Latin America.
Translation: Donna Stonecipher
