"I don’t know whether to curse you or pray for you. I’m afraid of looking for you and meeting you. Sometimes, I just want to give up, but my eyes are dead from not seeing yours." These lyrics from a song slipped into René Ballesteros’ Landless Children - which was screened in a world premiere within the 48th Cinéma du Réel Festival’s international competition - perfectly illustrate the profound pain suffered in early childhood by adoptees, who try to trace back and reconnect with their roots once they’re adults.

But there’s another reason for heartache in the Chilean director’s new film (his 3rd feature after Quemadura and Dreams of the Castle [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film], which were acclaimed in the Cinéma du Réel Festival in 2010 and 2019): young forty-year-olds Daniel and Juan, who are respectively Swedish and French, are descendants of the Mapuche people and were stolen from their mothers, like many other Chilean children, in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

"Here’s the hospital where I was born 40 years ago. They told my mother I was stillborn (…) It’s like coming home and finding a burglar has taken what was most precious to you: your identity." Accompanying Daniel and Juan as they trace back their childhood, René Ballesteros (the winner of the Best Screenplay award in Venice’s 2019 Orizzonti line-up for Alireza Khatami’s fiction feature Oblivion Verses [+leggi anche:
recensione
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intervista: Alireza Khatami
scheda film]) charts two highly personal and moving investigations and the two protagonists’ reunions with their Chilean families, which take very different directions, alternating between the stories of tormented soul Daniel (whose mother and half-brothers never appear on screen) and gentle yet sceptical Juan (who meets one person after another, all the while wondering whether people are really telling him the truth about his adoption). Reliving their brutal uprooting with great emotional intensity, availing themselves of photos and discussions to shed light on the past and "to remind ourselves that life can be beautiful, even though it didn’t start out that way", the two men explore the ever-shifting mental territory of their lives, as if echoing the story of the Mapuche people who were once dispossessed of their lands.

Expertly edited and incorporating carefully considered surroundings (emotional reunions at the airport, freezing Swedish nights populated by ducks and foxes, Chile’s mountainous countryside and hidden, sacred grounds, the streets at night in Santiago and Tepuco...) which offer moments of respite from the painful stories unfolding, the film paints the portrait of two opposing personalities pulling on the same thread. In doing so, patiently listening, the director also gradually unveils an entire genealogy of indigenous sorrows ("it hurts to remember"), of poverty, but also of faith and mystical heritage, as if embarking on an emotional journey deep inside of ourselves and to the centre of the Earth: "Your spirit has been taken very far away, but you have returned. Our spirits fly in other spaces. You were torn away from your space, but your soul, your heart and your spirit always belonged to this space. Protect yourself. No-one is alone."

Landless Children was produced by French firm Les Films d'Ici in co-production with Chile’s La Madre and Ballesta Films.