19/10/12…..Thame Cinema TONIGHT – Nostalgia for the Light

THAME Cinema, usually open on a Saturday evening, will be showing the Chilean documentary ‘Nostalgia for the Light’ described as ‘A film of heart-stopping beauty and devastating horror.”

You wouldn?t imagine the two could co-exist, but Patricio Guzman?s film shows us a place where they do ? in Chile?s Atacama Desert. This deeply intelligent film of extraordinary beauty and tragic grandeur, in its desolate way as breathtaking as any BBC nature series.

See it on the big screen, and you get the full benefit of the vast blue skies over Atacama?s red sand and rock, shot with gorgeous contemplative clarity by Katell Djian. Nostalgia for the Light does something that, in the era of CGI space operas, you?d think impossible: it restores a cosmic dimension to cinema. But this profound and moving work also reminds us that part of the cosmic is the history of humanity ? politics, slaughter and all. From Jonathan Romney in The Independent

Patricio Guzman travels 10,000 feet above sea level into Chile?s Attacama Dessert. Here the sky is so translucent that it allows astronomers to see the boundaries of our universe. Yet the dry dessert climate also preserves the human remains intact: pre-Columbian mummies; explorers and miners; and the remains of the ?disappeared from the Pinochet regime. Women sift the dessert soil for the bones of their loved ones, while archaeologists uncover traces of ancient civilisations and astronomers examine the most distant and oldest galaxies. Nostalgia for the Light is a gorgeous, deeply moving and personal odyssey into astronomy, archaeology, geology and human rights.

Run time 90 minutes. Certificate 12a – Film starts at 8pm and doors open 30 minutes before each film. Admission is