They focus shifts momentarily, first to the smiling face of Charlie’s friend Terry, who is also watching the game, then briefly to the children themselves, before we witness the arrival of a truck full of heavily armed soldiers. As the soldiers climb down from the truck and the children disperse. More than just creative cinematography, these inventive shot establishes a perspective emblematic of that which the film employs our focus is closely trained on Charlie, whom we are invited to read through his reaction to the scene unfolding in front of him. It is only as a consequence of our concern with Charlie that we witness the events of the coup. Like this scene, in which the threat of violence serves primarily as an opportunity
There are notably few Chilean characters in missing, and even fewer civilians. The one Chilean radicle they meet turns out to have gone into hiding and is later safely reunited with his pregnant wife in reality a highly unlikely scenario. The film’s selective vision is most poignantly revealed in the scene in which Ed and Beth finally receive permission to search for Charlie in the National Stadium, an improvised prison camp where the military regime detained, tortured, and murdered hundred and perhaps thousands of Chilean civilians in the early days of the coup. When Ed and Beth emerge from a dark tunnel onto the sunny playing field, they are met with a shocking image. As the camera pans across the stands, viewers see they are full of prisoners whose ragged appearance and improvised shelters suggest they have been in captivity for some time. Over the loudspeaker, Beth and Ed identify themselves and address Charlie by name; Ed, lost in his own grief, recalls a cross-country road trip that he and his son took together. Standing on the playing field, they search futilely for Charlie among the crowds in the stands. Ed and Beth occupy the foreground of the scene, and their out sized grief dominates the frame, while the prisoners suffering is depicted in the background, in aggregate and in miniature. Amid the thousands of prisoners, only Ed, Beth, and the absent Charlie are legible as