Chile’s Los Bunkers, one of the most admired of Latin America’s rock bands, has signed on to score “The Last Witness” (“El Ultimo Testigo”), a doc feature portrait of Luis Poirot, a Chilean photographer who has snapped many key events and figures in the country’s history from Salvador Allende to the estallido outburst of social protests in 2019, and beyond.
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Some of Poirot’s earliest photos, all black and white, capture Allende on his successful 1959 presidential campaign trail, Poirot appointed its official photographer. He took illicit shots of Chile’s presidential Palacio de la Moneda days after Allende died there in a military coup d’etat, its windows gutted by Chilean Air Force strafing. He also snapped Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda at his Isla Negra beachside home.
Directed by Catalan documentarian-journalist Francesc Relea (“Serrat y Sabina: el símbolo y el cuate”), “The Last Witness” captures Poirot shooting bestselling novelist Isabel Allende (“The House of Spirits”), director Pablo Larrain (“Spencer,” “El Conde”) who has a camera in hand to take shots of Poirot, actor-theatre director Alfredo Castro, and Catalan singer-composer Joan Manuel Serrat, the voiceover recording comments made by them about Poirot.
On the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup d’état, images of Poirot’s photos of the strafed Casa de la Moneda eerily projected onto its restored facade. Poirot is there and his reaction: He takes a photo.
Chilean cinema has battled for decades to portray the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973-1989 dictatorship and struggled to preserve Chile’s historical memory.
“I’ve been obsessed by memory, that we shouldn’t forget things. That’s why I became a photographer,” Poirot comments.
In “The Last Witness,” Poirot opens his heart and, for the first time, his unpublished photo archive.
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Poirot and, indeed, Los Bunkers – caught in the documentary performing the rock anthem “Miño” during the Estallido – are links to Victor Jara, the hugely influential protest singer arrested, tortured and executed by Pinochet’s security forces.
Poirot was a friend, photos capturing Jara laughing in a park. Los Bunkers have sung his songs. “No death is justified, but Victor’s I do not forget and do not forgive,” Poirot tells Isabel Allende.
At the final editing stage before entering post-production, “The Last Witness” is produced by Chile’s Villano and Spain’s What’s Up Doc, founded by Relea, who co-financed the feature, partly through crowdfunding. Juan Pablo Sallato, Ismael Larraín, Juan Ignacio Sabatini and Isabel Jubert produce.
“‘The Last Witness’ is a review of the trajectory of a symbol of Chilean and Latin American photography and a tribute to a style of work. As a journalist, I met Luis Poirot in the ’90s, and we worked together on several projects,” Relea told Variety . “As a director, I want to show the story of a great photographer who has witnessed on the front line some of the most important events of the past 50 years in Chile as well as in Spain,” he added.
Launched in 2009, Villano produces TV series (celebrated procedural “The Hunt”), films (“Kill Pinochet”) and doc features.
“I am convinced that our passion for creating films and series is driven by a profound desire to tell compelling stories that leave a lasting impact,” Villano producer Sallato told Variety.
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