Cintamani Films

Iraqi theater director Mohsen Sadoon Yasin has spent much of his life in involuntary exile. His daughter, Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, has constructed a loving film portrait of her father, and an elegy for a homeland to which they can never return—partly because it has changed so much, and partly because it was perhaps always more a concept than a reality.

During the first days after the 1973 coup d’état, the political leadership of the Popular Unity government was arrested and transferred to Dawson Island, Magallanes Region, extreme south of Chile and the mainland. The wives of the then-political prisoners began an incessant effort to find out the whereabouts of their husbands and then try to return them alive. In these circumstances, they meet and spontaneously organize into a group called the “Dawsonianas.”

In a distant town, a birdman whispers the story of a madman: Horse Dude, a weirdo.