Songs of Repression

Dignity Colony, a quiet German settlement transformed into a fruitful tourist destination in Chile, hides a macabre past under a surreal mask. Forty years ago, a sect was set up in which religious verbosity was mixed with paramilitary training, sexual abuse of minors, assassination of opponents, and arms trafficking.

Its leader, Paul Schäfer, a Nazi and Pinochet supporter, turned the Colony into a place for torture and death. After his escape from the pursuit of justice, many of his inhabitants left the colony to build a future far from past traumas. But many of the sect's co-founders and their descendants are still living there in a tense and perplexing coexistence between abused and abusers, torturers and tortured. Forty-five years later, we discover the gruesome past and delusional present of three generations of inhabitants from the Colony with a repertoire of compelling testimonies. To what extent do we prefer to forget the past and ignore the monster we carry inside?