Video & On Demand - The Pearl Button (Online and DVD)

★★★★★

'Unmissable...The Pearl Button is another Patricio Guzmán film. So unpack the superlatives…This documentary holds every card in the pack, from geology to anthropology to the history of tribes and tyrants, and plays them like a master.'

Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times

★★★★★

'Patricio Guzmán cinema travels through time and space with the seamless ease of a whisper. Humanist and historical, intergalactic and elemental, his films are deceptively dense. One moment could be mired in the trauma of Chile’s dictatorial Pinochet era, and the next ascending to the heavens or dipping underneath the water’s surface. Malleability remains a crucial component for a filmmaker working so thoroughly in the cross section between national history and personal memory… Grows in magnitude and importance with each passing day.'

Glenn Heath, Little White Lies

★★★★

'It really is intelligent, magnificent film-making.'

Andrew Pulver, The Guardian

★★★★

'Patricio Guzmán's essay-style documentary is a deceptive but very moving affair.'

Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent

★★★★

'The Pearl Button is a piece of visual poetry that meanders along the waterways, coastline and history of Chile, coming into sharp and horrifying focus on the atrocities of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship....visually stunning.'

Kate Muir, The Times

'Guzmán’s 2010 film Nostalgia for the Light is one of the past decade’s great films, and The Pearl Button is a worthy companion piece. This is a film of masterly artistry, heaving political anger and uncontained ambition.'

Ed Lawrenson, The Big Issue

'The Pearl Button is ultimately about cinema’s unique way of retelling the past, about a visual language that links Pinochet’s victims to the Yámana peoples through the image of a button. Water is ultimately the conduit that Guzmán uses to bind the different memories into a bold, poetic narrative that asks profound questions of humanity and indeed of cinema’s responsibilities to the wider world.'

Maria Delgado, Sight & Sound

'Guzmán combines science, metaphor and narrative ingenuity to create a kind of metaphysical history lesson about the relationship between water, the cosmos and political turmoil in Chile. A film of wonder and dread, where the ‘language of water’ helps us better understand of the language of impunity, The Pearl Button is a contemplative stunner.'

Robert Greene, Sight and Sound ('The Best of 2015 in Cinematic Nonfiction')

‘Patricio Guzmán follows ‘Nostalgia for the Light’ with another philosophical and cosmic historical documentary…always full of wonder and imagination.’

Dave Calhoun, Time Out

★★★★
'Filled with stunning images and steered by a restless curiosity, The Pearl Button is incredibly beautiful.'

Allan Hunter, The Daily Express

★★★★

'An astoundingly beautiful visual essay which revels in the stunning scenery of Chilean Patagonia, it morphs into a harrowing depiction of the nation's distant and recent past.'

Matthew Anderson, Cinevue

‘It is the director’s extraordinary intuition about the synchronicity of history, geography and the physical universe – a mysterious relationship that has nothing to do with cause and effect – that gives the film and its predecessor their undeniable power. Watching them opens up mental windows, unknown vistas appear, subliminal connections are made.’

Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter

'lyrical, impressionistic and profound...Gorgeous cinematography by Katell Djian plus compelling archival and portrait photos round out this unique, hypnotic documentary.'

Garry Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

'A stunning achievement…another major cinematic accomplishment.

Guzman's unique gift lies in his ability to weave together multiple modes of documentary: the picturesque, the political and the poetic …"The Pearl Button" is a vivid, essential portal to understanding not only the heritage of a nation, but also the art of nonfiction cinema.

Kevin B. Lee, Indiewire

‘…poetically shot gem.’

Peter Yeung, The Daily Telegraph

‘…an elegant essay that ties together the horrors of colonialism with those of the Pinochet era and makes great plays of elemental matters in a similar way to Nostalgia for the Light.’

Nick James, Sight and Sound

'Film of the week...Guzmán now follows Nostalgia, a film made under the sign of dryness, with its counterpart, a contemplation of water...eerie, impressionistic...The Pearl Button has no shortage of documentary force or of imaginative seriousness.'

Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

‘Deeply poetic… humanist meditation on buried traces of the past and how they determine our present and future as a race and as a civil society.’

Lee Marshall, Screen International

'Mr. Guzmán begins by simply depicting water and landscapes with mind-altering nature photography that primes us for his meditations on memory and loss... His introspection finds a kind of justice through poetry, and shows how memory must always be a continuing process.'
Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times

'Gorgeous documentary'

Sherilyn Connelly, SF Weekly

'stunning'

J. R. Jones, The Chicago Reader

★★★★★

‘Looking at all these themes on paper, there is no way they should be able to co-exist within the same film, let alone do so in harmony, but Guzmán lets each wave of thought flow over the other, tributaries of history gathering to a ocean of argument that carries you with it at once transfixed by the beauties of the cosmos and the horrors of man's inhumanities to man.’

Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film