The Motherland

The Motherland is an ironic parable of Downeys native Chile Returning to Santiago he finds a society in the grips of the military dictatorship of General August Pinochet In a scenario that suggests the magic realism of Latin American fiction Downey visits the suburban house of his youth and stages a surreal reenactment of the Motherland giving birth to a duck while the crucified Prophet looks on This overtly symbolic scene is intercut with the spectacle of General Pinochet and his troops in full regalia In an unsparing indictment of the economic and political reality of the dictatorship The Motherland offers the Prophet as a sacrifice to the goosestepping ranks of Pinochets junta This savage allegory in which church and state conspire to oppress society and the individual merges the subjective and the cultural the autobiographical and the political