By Miguel Littin (director of "Dawson, Isla 10," Chile's official entry for 2010 Academy Awards consideration in the Best Foreign Language Film category.)
(January 2010)

Hemingway said, "A story starts when someone is born, someone dies, someone leaves, or someone arrives."

After seven hours of hazardous navigation in a big boat, exhaling like the groaning of a hurt animal, we finally reached straight land. Dawson is the name of the island, formerly named the island of death, an old refuge for adventurers and hunters who came from different parts of the world looking for gold, that transmuted into blood from a race of men and women called "selkman" who were exterminated at the end of the 19th century.

This trip is unique and has been promoted by the survivors of the concentration camps on the island. They have wanted to return after thirty-five years; they need to remember. I travel with them because of a very special invitation. Someone wants a witness; could it be me?

Dawson, Latitude 53, end of the world.

This is the scenery where the military dictatorship that took over Chile in 1973 built concentration camps for prisoners of war, similar to the Nazi camps in Europe during the Second World War.

The island smells like moss, and the wind, which seems to take us, is of acid flavor. One by one, they step off the boat: the former ministers of the democratic government of Salvador Allende, the constitutional president who died defending his country, with a weapon in his hand, for the right to live in peace. There were the men of Dawson, with tired gestures, their eyes lost in distance, mute, searching for the lost time. They were surrounded by heavily armed Marines who harassed them, Marines who today, just like thirty-five years ago, control the island, a strategic point for the Chilean defense and Marine force.

Little by little, those who yesterday were prisoners, today take possession of the uncertain space of the island. "Here we slept; here the barracks were installed; here, the metal wire fences and the black bread. Here, our sufferings, our poor recollections broken by anguish. Here is the small frozen lake where we washed our clothes' dignity. We came to take back our corpses."

I see how a tear falls through dark glasses and recall Neruda's poem of the prayed tear that falls on stone and grows a nest.

By the seashore, a man leans on the sun. His knees are wet from the water. The water is cold; water from the coldest sea in the world - the sea of Latitude 53. In a handful of traces a small, black stone has a heart carved on it. From very far, the wind brings us a song. The song says, "We will never be as young as today." I hold tight my notebook and an old edition of the book "Isla 10" that has been with me for so many months. The book is written by Sergio Bitar, who was one of the prisoners in the island that was given the number as its one and only identity. Today, the Marine Corps offers military honors. The scene is grotesque, paradoxical, right there in front of my amazed eyes. There is also Island 3, Island 4, Island 8, 9, 11; the numbers and methods are the same through history. It is midday and the men of Dawson recognized each other somehow, perplexed and with joy. The surprise of being alive in the island. They hug and call each other's names; they open their maps that flow with the wind; they go through the places where they slept; where, in silence the Christians prayed and so the Jewish, the agnostics meditated and others reaffirmed their convictions. They played chess, the communists, at the end; they cried and cursed, searched for the eye of God in the island to lighten up their lives.

I walk through the island. The land is acid, salty; it smells like blood. The trees bend; they try to combat the wind. The smallest trees do so in pain. The big ones die standing up, with no leaves or foliage - open bellies, lonely symbols, witnesses of what nature used to be before man destroyed it. The northeast winds bring the voices from the past; they cross with the winds from the southeast; they hit each other, go up as curls of violence. In the emptiness, a unique present is been reconstructed: the coral history that suffered the men in prison on Dawson, although they resisted because their dignity and democratic force were stronger than barbarism.

I travel to Mexico with my notes and there I find my friend, Gabriel García Márquez. I tell him the story, and he looks straight into my eyes and warns me: "You have a film."

Director Miguel Littin

A year later, I cross the Magellan Straits along with a hard and strong group of young filmmakers - including 12 students from my cinema classes - and we start the work of the film.

That morning the snow falls, striking the faces of the actors. The wind almost knocks down the camera and strongly grabs the tripod, but the director of photography, Miguel Ioan, is stronger and takes the camera in his hand and starts to shoot with a strong and quiet pulse. The paths and roads of the island shine under the snow. The great, frozen lake is a pale mirror. Suddenly, the light breaks through the clouds and the sun appears imposing, gold, the red shining as a huge mirror that, as in a screen, reflects life. The brave cast waits for the signal, "camera-action." We start shooting, to print fire in the celluloid; the photography will tell the story to unknown audiences, remote people whom we will never meet. That is the magic of cinema. Sculpting in the wind, we started the first day of shooting of "Dawson, Island 10."

Many days after returning to the continent, I ask myself, "What was the reason or main motive that made me search for resources, convince people, sum up people to start this adventure?" Making a film in Latin America and especially in Chile is not just a technical and economic challenge but is also a matter of confronting censorship that moves through shadows, hidden powers with the mission to keep these histories forgotten. That's why there is a permanent disqualification. Cinema must not be political, they say as they scare away and use the power of the media to quietly squelch whoever dares to tell the stories, and many filmmakers fall into their traps and enter the game.

Cinema, an ontology that is born from life, projects it and, through emotion and truth, permeates the consciences of free men and women of this world. In their names and for them, I film.

Photos courtesy of the filmmaker