The Chilean auteur Patricio Guzmán continues his lifelong work of creating a counter-narrative to his country's official history. Where Guzmán's previous film 'Nostalgia for the Light' attempted to uncover hitherto unseen stories that were buried in the Chilean desert sand, he this time dives down into the sea and finds sunken wreckage from Chile's tragic past.

Along the Chilean coast lived a wealth of indigenous tribes, which were almost wiped out by European colonisation. And during Pinochet's regime, thousands of corpses were thrown into the mass grave of the foaming ocean. The brutal events, which are suppressed from the pages of the history books, are brought up from the seabed and into broad daylight by Guzmán. But alongside these scenarios, 'The Pearl Button' is also a film of unadulterated, striking beauty. In tableaux from the Chilean surf, water becomes a metaphor of cultural memory, and Guzmán finds the balancing point between geography and national self-image.

The film won the Silver Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. 

"intelligent, magnificent film-making" ★★★★ Guardian

"Patricio Guzmán’s cinema travels through time and space with the seamless ease of a whisper." ★★★★ Little White Lies