Pablo Navarrete and his parents, walk up to an unassuming house in a leafy Santiago neighbourhood. His mother, Cristina, whose brave personal testimony will go on to provide the narrative for the film, tells us this was once a notorious torture centre, La Venda Sexy – and that she had been detained there after Chile’s 1973 military coup. Just then, the house’s residents drive up to the gate to find these unwanted visitors. Questions quickly turn into accusations, demands for acknowledgement met with denial, all caught on camera in a sequence that captures the essence of the film: a story of a return that weaves Chile’s dark past with the ongoing fight against political amnesia.

The story is also about an awakening: both Chile’s albeit fleeting 2019 mass social uprising, and the director’s own. The film begins in that Santiago of 2019, when, after years of simmering anger over growing social inequality, a simple hike in the cost of metro fares lights the fuse. Navarrete, camera in tow, heads to the country he confesses to have long kept at arm’s length, inspired by the millions of Chileans who took to the streets demanding an end to the free market system installed during the dictatorship that made commodities out of health care, education, pensions at their expense.

Another type of documentary might have focused on granular detail of this political story. While the film (edited and co-produced by Argentinian filmmaker Rodrigo Vázquez-Salessi) does artfully weave archival footage of the dictatorial past in order to suggest cause and effect with a Chile seething with rage, it reserves the main arc and the centre of the frame for his mother. Cristina Godoy-Navarrete allows her son to film her as she shares harrowing accounts of unimaginable torture, but only if he also shows her refusal to be cowered, be it in footage of her relentless political activism over the years, or in a glitchy VHS video filmed in a London park after fleeing Chile as she embraces her husband Roberto: this is her body, and she will use it to love.

The film takes its place in a rich lineage of documentaries that have exposed how thousands of people were tortured or disappeared during the military regime, but it does so from the point of view of the diaspora. As the film itself recounts, 100,000s of Chileans fled and made their lives elsewhere, but they never stopped remembering their homeland. Their voices have a ghostly power in a country where public references to the past are kept to the minimum. Navarrete also locates it as part of a rich history of political resistance of the exiled community in the UK in an act of acknowledgement: most notably, the central role played by UK Chileans in a 503 day campaign to bring General Pinochet to justice after his arrest in London in the late 1990s.

It was only recently that Chile has begun to recognise contributions made by these transnationalised generations as a meaningful part of the country’s own cultural and political history. This year for the first time ever, Valeria Montti Colque, an artist from the Chilean diaspora, was chosen to represent the country in the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Colque’s “Cosmonación” constructs her parent’s country by ignoring the nation state altogether, and invoking instead indigenous epistemologies that Chile has long sought to silence. It would be heartwarming to know that films like Navarrete’s might be acknowledged by Chile as diasporic contributions that represent a citizenry beyond its borders.

Back in Santiago, Navarrete may have opened the film in a well-to-do neighbourhood, but he soon wants to take us elsewhere – to La Victoria, a low-income area on the outskirts of the city. It is no accident that this sequence makes it into the film: the neighbourhood was the first mass organised land occupation in Latin America and site of fearless political resistance during the dictatorship. The symbolism sharpens when the family tours around a community TV station Señal 3: a makeshift alternative media outlet that positions itself in opposition to the right-wing corporate media that has dominated Chile media landscape. Outside the TV station we see a shot of a mural. It reads: “Communication at the service of the people” – Navarrete’s film is precisely that.

Mother, Country screens in Sheffield and London in July. Click here for more information about these screenings.