Episode Details

The Promised Land (Spanish: La tierra prometida) (1973/Chile; 120 min., color, sound, Spanish); Dir. Miguel Littín. Cast: Nelson Villagra, Marcelo Gaete, Rafael Benavente. A socialist epic recounting the struggles of revolutionary Chilean peasants in the 1920s and 1930s (IMDB).

On this episode of Cinema Then, Cinema Now, Professor Jerry Carlson (College of Staten Island) sits down with Sergio Castilla (director of The Story, The Disappeared, Gentile alouette) and Andres Racz (director of When the People Awake, assistant director of The Promised Land) to discuss Miguel Littín's The Promised Land (1973) as part of series Survey of the Last Twenty-Five Years of Latin American Cinema.

Other topics of discussion:
Members of the production killed during the 1973 Chilean coup.
Influences of French New Wave, magical realism, neorealism.
Connection to other directors Glauber Rocha, Jorge Sanjinés, Miklós Jancsó.

Recorded on May 10th, 1989 at the Borough Manhattan Community College Media Center.

This program was digitized, captioned, and made accessible in 2021 as part of "Uncovering CUNY'S Audiovisual Heritage," a preservation project funded by Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).