Features

Desplazados

Southern Chile, 1978 — four-year-old Antonia López and her family are forced from their home by Pinochet’s dictatorship. Nearly 50 years later, she returns to the land she once called home, now a privatized luxury nature reserve marketed as conservation. Through pilgrimages, workshops, and legal action, Antonia rallies her community to memorialize and reclaim the territory that was theirs. The film explores intergenerational trauma, resilience, and the fight to confront entrenched power and reclaim land in southern Chile.

DESPLAZDOS (The Displaced) follows Antonia (58), a leader of rural families displaced during Chile’s military dictatorship, as she fights to reclaim land, memory, and dignity in the forests of southern Chile. Born in Río Chico, Antonia was raised in a worker-run forestry community that was violently dismantled after the 1973 coup, forcing her family into displacement.

 

Decades later, the same land is controlled by powerful elites and rebranded as luxury conservation, transforming sites of exile into playgrounds accessible only to the wealthy. When former residents reconnect in 2019, Antonia emerges as a leader, reclaiming a small parcel of land and organizing pilgrimages, assemblies, and legal struggles for recognition and reparations.

 

As the community rebuilds, a new threat looms: the resurgence of far-right politics led by defenders of the Pinochet era, placing hard-won gains at risk. Desplazada reveals how conservation can become a tool of erasure and how collective memory and solidarity become acts of resistance.

Film Topics Include:

  • Maria Jose Calderon

    Co-Director

  • Samuel Pigott

    Co-Director

  • Nate Birnbaum 

    Producer

  • Benjamin Stephen

    Producer

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