Biarritz (AFP)

For the Franco-Chilean director Carmen Castillo, who recounted in her documentaries the resistance against the Pinochet dictatorship, the social movements underway in Chile as in France show that the "hot embers" of the revolt have rekindled, faced with a neoliberalism that conquered the planet.

The author and director is the guest of honor at Fipadoc, a documentary festival which ends on Saturday in Biarritz (south-west of France), and during which several of her works have been screened, including "Rue Santa Fe" , a poignant testimony which mixes its personal history and that of opponents to the dictatorship of Pinochet.

History teacher, close to Socialist President Salvador Allende and wife of Miguel Enriquez, leader of the Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR, she lived through the nightmare of the coup of September 11, 1973, during which the soldiers overthrew the regime and impose a bloody dictatorship.

With Miguel, she settles underground in a suburb of Santiago. But on October 5, 1974, their house, rue Santa Fe, was stormed. Miguel is killed after an hour and a half of fighting and she, while pregnant, is injured.

She survives thanks to the courageous and disinterested intervention of a neighbor, Manuel. Deported to Europe thanks to an international mobilization campaign, she escapes the torture and death that thousands of opponents (including hundreds of MIR members) will suffer.

- "New poetics" -

In an interview with AFP, Carmen Castillo told of her long way out of the "meantime" of exile. The suicide of her friend Beatriz Allende (daughter of the former president), in 1977, was for her a "cry of alarm", and pushed her to start her life over in France.

"Beatriz saved my life, and extracted me from something that could be deadly. And Paris, after her death in Cuba, was the only possible place in which I could become anonymous, destroy the heroic widow, find the women's movement, and meeting great thinkers, who helped me understand that this linear temporality - past, present, future - did not exist, that the question was becoming, experience, encounters, "said -she.

Before creating documentaries, she first found a form of catharsis through writing, fueled by exchanges with poets, writers and philosophers.

Like the Trotskyist theorist Daniel Bensaïd, who died in 2010, to whom she devoted another documentary, "We are alive", in the form of reflection on political engagement and new forms of struggle, from the Chiapas of sub-commander Marcos to those without papers in Paris and to women in the northern districts of Marseille.

And the social movements that erupted in Chile, or in France, show that the "burning embers" of disobedience, which subsisted in the middle of the "neoliberal market desert" were not extinguished. Even if the forms of action, and in particular the relation to the armed struggle, have evolved.

"We have to invent a new poetics, we are no longer in the aesthetics of our generation, even if it is the base of our memory - Allende, Miguel, the popular power -, which rises like a desire to 'a new regime, faced with the perfect neoliberalism that reigns in Chile,' she says.

- "Resonances" -

A pure and hard capitalism set up at the request of the Junta by the "Chicago boys", these economists of the Chicago School, disciples of Milton Friedman, who tested their policies in Chile before advising Reagan and Thatcher.

"It gives a cruel, harsh, relentless society, but despite 40 years of brainwashing and domestication through debt and consumption, we are witnessing an uprising that has lasted for almost four months and which will not go away", enthuses the director, who regularly returns to Chile where she participates in film workshops with young people.

And for her, "the resonances" between the protest of the Chilean youth and the social movements in France, from "yellow vests" to strikes against the pension reform, are obvious, because she sees in it the same rejection of a capitalism which would have become the only horizon of humanity.

"There are time shifts, but everything is connected," says Carmen Castillo, who sees "in both cases blind, deaf powers, who obey a religious vision of money, finance and the market, when that did not work ", except for" the richest 1% "of the population, and opposite, men and women who do not resign.

© 2020 AFP