Matias Rojas Valencia had already explored the dark period of Colonia Dignidad with the fictional feature film A Place Called Dignity, which premiered at TöFF in 2021, telling the story of Colonia Dignidad through the fictional perspective of a twelve-year-old boy, one of its victims.
Colonia Dignidad is a German-speaking colony founded by Paul Schaefer, a former Nazi soldier who fled to the Chilean countryside after World War II. He literally ruled the place for generations, building a regime of terror, torture, child abuse, and murder with the protection of the former dictator Augusto Pinochet. During his military dictatorship, the place also became a center for internment, torture, and assassination of political dissidents. The community subtly became indispensable to the locals, providing schooling and medical services in an area where there would otherwise be none.
After the return to democracy in 1991, it was opened, its inhabitants-prisoners were freed, and it was renamed Villa Baviera – a place where two hundred people currently live.
Schaefer later fled to Argentina.
Colonia Dignidad has attracted the attention of numerous filmmakers, including the recent Netflix docuseries A Sinister Sect: Colonia Dignidad.
The Chilean director Rojas Valencia once again returns to explore the depths of its horror, but this time not through fiction, but by constructing a documentary: Winter Howl, now premiering at TöFF. Produced by Clara Larrain, winner of the Promising Producer Award at the 2021 BE Co Production Market, this work is particularly captivating for its content as much as for its style.
For the most part, the narrative focuses on Ingrid and Franz, former prisoners-guests who spent most of their lives in the colony, and eventually get married.
They lived there from the early ‘60s – when they arrived in Chile from Germany – to 2003, and spent over forty years living as slaves in complete isolation.
But the story of Winter Howl is not just the story of the colony, but it is also about another place. It is about the house they built after they were free. A secluded place in the Chilean mountain woods, which, in the snowy photography of the film, takes on the tones of a Pieter Bruegel painting. It’s a story about their daily life, marked by the simple activities related to their self-sufficiency. Feeding the chickens, taking care of the animals, chopping wood, cooking.
Alongside melancholic bucolic images in a snowy setting where everything seems to flow peacefully, memories of the years in Colonia Dignidad come to mind. Franz, a torture victim, spent thirty years in the hospital within the colony. This was a common case for others as well. The term “adoption” masked a very different concept, that of abduction (“he entered when he was 10 years old, and never saw his mother again”).
The second chapter of the film is a fictional moment that delves deeper into the community’s story, but in reality, it greatly undermines it, as there was really no need for it. This narrative impasse, which is resolved when we return to the two real protagonists of the film, does not completely disturb, such is the strength of the rest.
Despite the atrocities that are told, the great power of the film lies mainly in hope. Through the innocent faces of Ingrid and Franz, from which it is difficult to discern such a traumatic past, through their calloused hands from work, their smiles, their relationship with life, nature, and the passage of time, we understand a fundamental concept of humanity. Resilience. Humans have natural antibodies to evil. Despite the horror that is depicted and the impunity that accompanies it, goodness still prevails. The smiles of two old people who have survived emerge victorious, as they bravely decide to do the only thing that is left to bring justice to themselves and the other victims: share their story.
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