Central to the analysis of a corpus of films dealing with current psychosocial conditions
in Chile and the challenges of communal reconciliation, are the concepts of collective
memory and social trauma. Chilean cinema of the postdictatorship reflects a society
whose channels of communication have been broken, in which the past continues to be a
source of contestation and dispute. The neoliberal system imposed in the early 1970s has
significantly contributed to an isolation and disaffection that limit the possibilities of
social healing. Cinema has assumed the role of recovering a sense of community by disallowing
the privatization of pain fostered by the hegemonic political practices and discourses
of the period of dictatorship by returning this suffering to the social arena from
which it originated.