Portside

In Pablo Larrain's new film the villain is not a fictional one. He is General Augusto Pinochet, the brutal, U.S.-backed military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 and died in 2006 still with the blood of thousands on his hands.

Director Larraín has stated that the way Latin Americans think is shaped by poetry, by metaphor, and that his film is partly concerned with the power of poetry to move and influence. We are shown Neruda’s huge influence, as a communist poet, over his natural constituency: the ordinary working man... But what we do not see in the film is the immensely moving capacity of poetry to break down barriers between people of diametrically opposed political beliefs.