
Chile after Pinochet: The search for the disappeared
Juan Eduardo Rojas-Vásquez has spent fifty years trying to learn what happened to his father and brother, arrested one month after Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup and never seen again. The film follows him back to Chile from his home in Germany as he retraces the case, which centers on Colonia Dignidad, a secretive German sect founded by Paul Schäfer, later convicted of child sex abuse. Testimony and archival material lay out how Schäfer let Pinochet's secret police run a detention and torture site inside the colony's grounds. Juan believes his father, caught in a land dispute with his employer, and his brother, a Communist Party member, were killed and their bodies burned and buried there. Interviews with Juan and others connected to the case trace the mechanics of forced disappearance under the dictatorship and the decades-long silence around Colonia Dignidad. The film treats his search as still open, following him through the places tied to his family's case rather than delivering a resolved verdict.