Alfredo was 18 days old when his father Alfredo García Vega was taken by Pinochet’s forces. He was never seen again. The last testimony of his fate was by Lucho Costa Del Pozo, a fellow MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) member who survived after sharing rooms and bonding with him in the infamous Villa Grimaldi torture center. Almost 45 years later, Alfredo’s son and Lucho’s daughter, Paulina, use the power of cinema to try to reconstruct and recover the past. Their venture is captured in Roberto Baeza’s Meeting Point, an outstanding creative nonfiction film that pushes boundaries. It’s exciting and daring cinema that works as a therapeutic and educational tool.
Similar to what No Ordinary Man and Procession did, Meeting Point uses a film within a film structure: Baeza documents Alfredo and Paulina’s filmmaking process of trying to reenact key moments in their fathers’ past, like the few moments Alfredo got to spend with his newborn child or a domino game in the tight enclosure of a prisoner’s room. There’s no need for talking heads to explain everything as Baeza organically lets us understand the details of Alfredo and Lucho’s history through the observation of the preproduction, casting, and shooting.
We witness Alfredo and Paulina casting the right actors to play their fathers and mothers, Lucho describing the size of his room at Villa Grimaldi, workshops where performers themselves explain their motivations to take part in this film, and families coming together to relive, vent, and make sense of their past, which in turns allows for the construction of moments of painful reminiscence.
The brilliant decision to make Meeting Point a documentary instead of fiction allows the film to have a high level of raw emotion, as well as a better understanding of the psychological aftereffects of torture and forced disappearance. As a survivor and witness, the now 71-year-old Lucho is heavily involved in the process: as he relives the heart-wrenching memories of torture and his time with Alfredo in Villa Grimaldi, his daughter questions the purpose of her film. Should she subject her father to such a traumatizing process? Will this help him and everyone in the family heal? Meeting Point doesn’t just recreate history, it tries to understand it, process it, and question its consequences for an entire family. Watching Lucho and Silvia (Alfredo’s widow) react to actors reenacting their memories of love, loss, and pain makes for an unforgettable, intimate, and powerful experience.
Surrounding this cinematographic process is the 2019 Estallido Social. Thousands of people are taking to the streets to protest for a better Chile, but Piñeiro’s government retaliates with violence and human rights violations. It’s as if the ghost of Pinochet’s horrors is haunting Meeting Point, thus raising the urgency of its making. The whole experience is an attempt to heal and move forward as a family and as a country.
Meeting Point is an extraordinary piece of cinema that combines fiction and non-fiction formats to explore the generational trauma left behind by a bloodthirsty dictatorship. It’s been almost half a century, but the wounds are still open, and Roberto Baeza uses this work to bring more light to the violence of the past to forge a fair present and dream for a better future.
