The toxin clostridium botulinum was in his body when he died in 1973, days after Chile’s military coup. Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died after being poisoned with a powerful toxin. Neruda was internationally known Communist poet.
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.
When beloved poet and famous Communist Pablo Neruda is forced underground in post-WW II Chile, he sees the struggle with his police nemesis as an opportunity to reinvent himself.
More than 20 unseen works found, which his publisher says amount to 'a literary event of universal significance'.
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