Violeta Went To Heaven

Violeta Went To Heaven is Andrés Wood’s impassioned and impressionistic cinematic portrait of Chilean legend Violeta Parra – artist, singer, poet, and ethnomusicologist. Through her tireless documentation and performance of Chilean folk song, Parra brought the rich cultural heritage of Chilean’s rural poor to the attention of the world. Her work founded the "nueva canción" (Chilean new song) which canonised traditional multi-ethnic music and myths, shaking the dominant white, urban Chilean elite. Exhibited in the Louvre, Parra’s art could be seen side by side with the old European masters; through challenging that racist and sexist cultural hegemony, she inspired a socially and politically conscious pan-Latin American folk movement and galvanised Chile’s left before Pinochet’s bloody ascension in 1973.

Violeta, then, has the tough job of sketching this complex woman, her art and her life. No ordinary biopic, Wood's film weaves a tapestry of fragments – of Parra’s experiences and songs – as a patchwork of folklore, where the beauty and suffering of the past is always sewn beatifically through the present.