An East German Chile in Bulgaria: Notions of Longing and Displacement

The long-lasting relationship of the East German production company DEFA with Eastern European cinemas is documented by the great number of co-productions undertaken over the years of its existence. In a canon of DEFA films shot on location in Bulgaria, the ‘Chile films’ appear as interesting example of cultural hybridity and transnational filmmaking, which have yet to receive scholarly attention. The features Der Übergang/The Passage (1978), Die Spur des Vermiβten/Trace of the Disappeared (1980) and Blonder Tango/Blond Tango (1985), presenting East German views about human rights violations that occurred in Chile during the Pinochet regime, were made with Bulgarian, German and Chilean casts and crews. This paper examines the Eastern European physiognomies in these films and their meaning as conflation between East and South in the Cold War dynamics of the late 1970s to mid-1980s. While the films propagate notions of Third World solidarity and fascist denunciation in narrative terms, Eastern European natural and urban landscapes produce feelings of displacement and yearning for an intact place remote from East German reality