Invigorating insights into a nation at a crossroads

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2023

My Imaginary Country documents a new kind of grassroots protest, one in which every participant is also a citizen journalist; in which police and army atrocities are captured by a hundred phone cameras.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 11, 2023

It’s not his [Patricio Guzmán] most ambitious or poetic film, but it represents an old campaigner’s tribute to his young successors.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 9, 2023

Guzmán doesn’t need to hunt for symbolism as the protesters are often supplying their own.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 9, 2023

It is a frozen image of a point in time; a graceful snapshot of change in motion.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2023

All the ingredients here are invaluable, and the film’s vision comes alive with a real sense of hope about the soul of Chile and its thirst for change that’s palpable, not imaginary.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2023

You can feel how awed Guzmán is by these young people – chiefly, in fact, young women – and the vast populist force they summoned up.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 6, 2023

The trouble with making documentaries about current events is that things can go topsy-turvy overnight...And, sadly, Guzmán has once again only seen what he wanted to see.

| Feb 15, 2023

Like The Battle of Chile, My Imaginary Country is a politically urgent film. If The Battle of Chile was about the importance of rising up against oppression even if the resistance might fail; My Imaginary Country offers a more optimistic path forward.

| Jan 9, 2023

Patricio Guzmán combines reflection on the past, observation of the present, and hope for the future into an expansive vision of all the ideas he’s explored in his work.

| Nov 10, 2022

It’s a stirring film, of a movement that the director believes “altered the soul of Chile.” But though it ends with the election of the young, left-wing president Gabriel Boris... that aim has yet to be realised.

| Oct 17, 2022

The film is a remarkable mixture of biography, history and current events.

| Oct 10, 2022

Mixing recent and archival protest footage with a lot of representative talking heads, My Imaginary Country catches history’s lightning in a bottle.

| Oct 4, 2022

Testament to his curiosity as a storyteller, as Guzmán investigates the macro issues, he also pays close attention to details that may seem irrelevant, but that expand our understanding of how this breaking point injected renewed hope into the citizenry.

| Sep 29, 2022

Guzmán knows a good story when he sees it and it gives My Imaginary Country a modernity and a radicalness that belies its director’s age.

| Sep 27, 2022

Inscrutable and unexpected. [Full review in Spanish]

| Sep 26, 2022

If this were simply footage of protests, it would not stand out among the many other documentaries focused on mass demonstrations...

| Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 23, 2022

An engaging and inspiring example of the power people have to create change, big and small...

| Original Score: 8.5/10 | Sep 23, 2022

A rich tale of the power of popular protest and people action.

| Sep 23, 2022

A vital, powerful and illuminating documentary. It finds just the right balance between entertaining the audience and provoking them emotionally as well as intellectually.

| Sep 22, 2022