At the foot of the Andes Mountains in Chile lies an idyllic German colony called Villa Baviera (Bavarian Village). However, the beauty of the place conceals a grim past. This film explores how the colony formerly known as Colonia Dignidad today deals with with a past that featured child-abuse, torture and mass graves.
Winner of the CPH: DOX Award
Bonus Content: An introduction video to Songs of Repression by the directors Estephan Wagner and Marianne Hougen-Moraga is available on Riff@home
Yfirlýsingu leikstjóra
“We aim to explore how the individual and the community rewrite their past. Be it to be able to live on after having been abused, as a mechanism to forget and to avoid haunting nightmares, or be it to hide away from the shame and inner demons after having abused or tortured others.
Having worked intensely with the subject of repression for several years, our understanding has grown more nuanced than it was when we met and even more than from our differing childhood worldviews.
It was as if the colony slowly revealed all the different ways in which human beings are able to create systems of repression to hold each other in place – to the point where even something supposedly as beautiful and free as music becomes a tool for repression.”
Estephan Wagner and Marianne Hougen-Moraga, March 2020
