'Clandestine in Goa'

Faizal Khan/UNI

He was a close friend of Salvador Allende once. Later he became a daring exile who defied General Pinochet and subject of a Marquez book. Today, he is one of the most famous Latin American directors ever.Chilean Miguel Littin has come a long way ever since that horrible moment in his life when his country's President and his own hero, Allende, was assassinated in a coup by Pinochet in 1973.

Ask him what he feels about slipping into Pinochet's Chile disguised as a wealthy Uruguayan businessman shooting a commercial for a French cosmetics company, and he starts to feel uneasy. ''It's all over. All that is past. I live in the future,'' Littin, who is in Goa as the chairman of the jury for the 36th International Film Festival of India (IFFI), told UNI.

Littin's emotions are understandable --- his best friend dead and gone, a decade-and-a-half in exile and his hatred for Pinochet. He shrugs his shoulders and starts to move away at the very mention of the Chilean dictator and you start to wonder whether this grey-haired man was the same person who shot footage inside Pinochet's private office.

Littin was the head of the Chile Films when 9/11 happened to his own country three decades before it happened to the United States, which was blamed for backing the General. As Communist leader Allende's friend, he was right on the top of the list of the 'most wanted' people after the coup on September 11, 1973. After he fled, he became one of the 'most wanted' exiles.

Twelve years after he left his country, Littin returned to Chile to direct three foreign film crews to tell the outside world what was happening under military dictatorship. Make-up artists altered his face and hairstyle and linguistic experts changed his Chilean accent. The result: his own mother did not recognise him in Chile.

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a fellow Latin American, Littin's 'illegal' film had behind it another film that would probably be never made. "This may not have been the most heroic action of my life, but it was the most worthwhile," Marquez quotes the filmmaker in the introduction to his book on the adventure --- 'Clandestine in Chile'. Chilean authorities impounded and burned 15,000 copies of the book in 1986.

Salman Rushdie called Littin's return to Chile an underground adventure, which ''contrives to represent and dramatize the heroic resistance of countless other Chileans, some successful, many other tortured or disappeared'' during Pinochet's rule.

Littin, whose 2005 film 'La Ultima Luna' (The Last Moon) is part of the Cinema of the World section at IFFI, is living every moment of freedom in Chile. ''It's a democracy now. There is freedom of expression. The people can speak whatever they want to speak,'' says Littin, who likes India, the world's largest democracy, more than its films.

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