The incarceration of suspected radicals in the soccer stadium at Santiago following the coup against Chile's Marxist president Salvador Allende in 1973 is the subject of this intermittently powerful documentary by Carmen Luz Parot (the event also provided the premise for Costa-Gavras' feature film Missing, in which an American father sought his son). National Stadium consists primarily of interviews with survivors of the ordeal--who return to the site to recount the brutalities perpetrated by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in its early days--interspersed with newsreel footage and observations by other eyewitnesses. The stories are mostly somber but occasionally uplifting, as when interviewees recall guards who eschewed their customary cruelty to perform rare acts of kindness, or the prisoners' symbolic victory over their captors. Not as sharply structured as it might be, the film has a tendency to meander, and it doesn't maintain sufficient focus on its stated theme--i.e., the poor media coverage of the detainees' plight--but it still builds considerable cumulative power. Simple in execution but strong in effect, National Stadium offers another telling commentary on the extraordinary inhumanity that so often attended 20th-century political conflict. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
National Stadium
(2001) 90 min. In Spanish w/English subtitles. VHS: $200. LAVA. PPR. Color cover. Volume 19, Issue 2
National Stadium
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