Character Relationship Map: The Pearl Button

Characters

• Narrator (voice) (played by Patricio Guzmán) — protagonist

  The film’s guiding voice presents Chile’s geography and history through water, linking the persecution of indigenous peoples with the victims of the Pinochet regime. The narration frames the personal...

• Self (played by Martín G. Calderón) — supporting
• Self (played by Gabriela Paterito) — supporting
• Self (played by Raúl Zurita) — supporting
• Self (played by Claudio Mercado) — supporting
• Self (played by Gabriel Salazar) — supporting
• Self (played by Javier Rebolledo) — supporting
• Self (played by Cristina Calderón) — supporting
• Self (uncredited) (played by Emma Malig) — supporting
• Self (played by Juan Molina) — supporting
• Self (played by Adil Brkovic) — supporting

Story Analysis

The film links water, Indigenous dispossession, political violence, and the continuing search for truth and the dead.

Plot Progression

1. Water and Indigenous Worlds — The film begins with water sealed in ancient quartz and reflects on water as the source of life. It then presents Indigenous communities in the southern fjords and their connected understanding of the...
2. Colonization and Cultural Loss — European arrival brings displacement, violence, and the taking of Indigenous territories for farming. The account also recalls a young man taken to England, the maps that opened Patagonia to settlemen...
3. Dictatorship and the Ocean — The film shifts from social change and the return of Indigenous lands to the coup and dictatorship. It describes torture, secret prisons, Dawson Island, and the use of the ocean to conceal the dead.
4. Memory and Unfinished Justice — Testimony about flights carrying bodies makes the ocean both a grave and a witness. The film closes by emphasizing the need to return the dead and pursue truth, while the search and accountability rem...