After the murder of her husband, the folk singer Victor Jara, in the course of the military coup in Chile in September 1973, Joan Jara returned to Britain with her two young children. Stanley Forman, a distributor of leftwing documentaries, offered to finance and produce a short film that friends hoped might ease some of the pressure on Joan’s life, and he asked me to direct it.
Filming interviews then involved reloading the camera with fresh film every 10 minutes – a process that could wreck efforts to build up a sense of connection. In nine minutes, without a break, Joan detailed the circumstances that led to Victor’s death.
That testimony became the heartbeat of a 50-minute documentary, Compañero: Victor Jara of Chile (1975), screened in Britain by Thames Television, and part of Joan’s decades-long campaign to seek out and challenge her husband’s murderers and the destroyers of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government.
