Colonia

Florian Gallenberger's Colonia opened in 2015 and won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Production, alongside multiple Lola nominations at the German Film Awards. The film is a fictionalised treatment of the actual Colonia Dignidad — the sealed German-Chilean cult compound founded by the former Wehrmacht officer Paul Schäfer in 1961, which operated under the protection of the Pinochet regime as a torture and detention site for political prisoners after 1973, and which was finally dismantled and prosecuted in the early 2000s.

September 1973, Santiago de Chile. Lena (Emma Watson, in her first major adult lead) is a young Lufthansa flight attendant visiting her German boyfriend Daniel (Daniel Brühl), a graphic designer working with Allende-aligned political artists. Pinochet's coup arrives during her visit; Daniel is taken by the secret police to Colonia Dignidad, the German-speaking community in the south where political detainees were systematically tortured. Lena follows him into the cult, posing as a new initiate, and the film follows the parallel attempts of both — from inside the locked dormitory and the locked detention block — to find each other and to escape.

The film's commitment to the historical record of Colonia Dignidad — the dual-purpose church, the agricultural facade, the radio operations — was supported by extensive interviews with actual survivors. Michael Nyqvist, in one of his last roles before his death in 2017, plays the Schäfer character with an unsettling charisma. The film was politically consequential in Germany and Chile; its release renewed public attention on the unfinished Colonia Dignidad prosecutions.