Onkel Günter

A Chilean family of German descendants must confront a painful episode dating back to World War II. Back and forth, between Chile and Germany, the director turns to his own story to reflect on how his family’s memory and thus history, has been shaped, and how past behaviors from the Nazi times have echoes and consequences in present generations in Chile. Onkel Günter connects WWII with the dictatorship of Pinochet, with an intimate and reflexive take on diaspora, migration, family and selective memory. Like many descendants of German immigrants in South America, the members of the Grüzmacher family grew up piecing together a story of which they did not know much. The silence of their past was filled with their own fantasies, generation after generation. For some of them, Günter, the handsome pilot, became a hero. Thousands of miles away and almost 80 years later, some members of this family still believe that Germany should have won this war.