The time period for
this film is the Chilean military coup by Pinochet of 1973 and is based on true
events. Lena is a flight attendant
for Lufthansa, she has been seeing Daniel and he’s an activist from Germany. They are out on the streets at the time
of protesting and arrests by the military. Daniel has a camera and Lena tries to get him to stop taking
pictures. Daniel is detained by
the military and Lena doesn’t know where they have taken him? Daniel has been taken to an underground
tunnel and he is tortured for information that he doesn’t know. Lena joins a charitable mission run by
German lay preacher Paul Schafer and she is hoping she will be able to learn
what happened to Daniel. The
mission is called Colonia and no one has ever escaped alive from this compound. The mission is based on some religious
tenets, it supports a punitive agrarian lifestyle and is aggressively
anti-Communism.
There is a lot of persecution
in this film and Colonia Dignidad was a real secret detention camp. It was founded by German émigrés in the
mid 1950’s. Paul Schafer arrived
in the colony in 1961. Eventually,
300 German and Chilean people resided in the camp and it covered 53 square
miles. The main legal support of
the colony was through agriculture.
At times there was a school, a hospital, two airstrips, a restaurant and
a power station. The compound also
did money laundering and weapon sales to supplement their income. Investigations uncovered child sexual
abuse, confinement and torture of prisoners arrested by Pinochet. Despite the tenseness and the terrible
treatment of people, this film seems to be covered with gauze reflecting
everything to be normal and the romance aspect seems to dilute what is
happening? 3* This movie is OK)
106
min, Drama directed by Florian Gallenberger with Emma Watson, Daniel Bruhl,
Michael Nyqvist, Richenda Carey, Vicky Krieps, Jeanne Werner, Julian Ovenden,
August Zierner, Martin Wuttke, Nicolas Barsoff.
Note: Imdb 7.1, 26% critic 61% audience on
Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert 2*, Amazon 4.1* out of 5* with 183 reviews,
Special
Note: Filmed in Luxembourg; Berlin
and Bavaria, Germany; Buenos Aires, Federal District, Argentina; Chile. Emma Watson also starred in Regression
of 2015, a film about a dangerous cult.
The cult members are given blue pills composed of drugs to make them
more calm and compliant. They
could have contained benzodiazepines used to treat anxiety and scopolamine to
make people susceptible to suggestion.
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