Violeta Went to Heaven

Violeta Parra grew up in the Chilean countryside, travelled the country village by village collecting folk songs, and recorded them. Then she wrote her own. She exhibited in Paris, her work was shown at the Louvre, and when she came home she put up a large tent outside Santiago and tried to make a cultural centre of it. Nobody came. She killed herself in 1967. Andrés Wood directs. Francisca Gavilán plays Violeta and sings the songs herself. The source is the book written by Violeta's son Ángel Parra. The structure is not chronological. Childhood, the Paris years, the love affairs and the period of the tent are interleaved; the narrative proceeds in pieces rather than building a life story. Violeta Parra is a foundational name in Latin American music; the song Gracias a la vida is known across the continent, and the film deliberately withholds when it was written. The narrative does not make her likeable. Violeta is stubborn, difficult and hard on those around her, and the film does not soften it. The collecting sequences are the best part; recording songs from old people in the countryside, and why that mattered, are described concretely. It won the world cinema grand jury prize at the 2012 Sundance film festival. Who it is for: anyone interested in Latin American music and in biographies of artists. Who it is not for: the structure is scattered, the shifts in time are hard to follow, and the context is incomplete without a knowledge of the music.