Cintamani Films

Iraqi theater director Mohsen Sadoon Yasin has spent much of his life in involuntary exile. His daughter, Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, has constructed a loving film portrait of her father, and an elegy for a homeland to which they can never return—partly because it has changed so much, and partly because it was perhaps always more a concept than a reality.

Three Pirquineros mounted on horseback to a long-seeked vein of gold located in the high mountain range of Atacama. Not long after reaching the planned place, the controversy arises over the Quispe sisters, belonging to the Kolla ethnic group, and their mysterious tragedy, as the place is a few meters from the rock where they were found hanging without life in December 1974. The Pirquineros arrive at their destination with rarefied spirits. They set up the base camp in the middle of an atmosphere charged with disturbing mystery. There, around the fire, they begin to tell some ghost stories, until Pascual resumes the theme about the triple crime, providing a testimony about his experience of having witnessed the macabre discovery. Paicha, who listens silently and attentively, has a traumatic memory of when he was a child: hidden behind a rock, he observes a violent episode of repression and mistreatment of indigenous shepherds.

During the first days after the 1973 coup d’état, the political leadership of the Popular Unity government was arrested and transferred to Dawson Island, Magallanes Region, extreme south of Chile and the mainland. The wives of the then-political prisoners began an incessant effort to find out the whereabouts of their husbands and then try to return them alive. In these circumstances, they meet and spontaneously organize into a group called the “Dawsonianas.”

In a distant town, a birdman whispers the story of a madman: Horse Dude, a weirdo.