Colonia

Florian Gallenberger's Colonia opened in 2015 and won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Production, along with several Lola nominations at the German Film Awards. It fictionalises the real Colonia Dignidad, the sealed German-Chilean cult compound founded in 1961 by the former Wehrmacht officer Paul Schäfer, which the Pinochet regime protected and used 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 political artists aligned with Allende. Pinochet's coup comes during her visit, and 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 tracks the two of them, one in the locked dormitory and the other in the locked detention block, as each tries to find the other and a way out.

The film keeps close to the historical record of Colonia Dignidad (the church with its double purpose, the agricultural facade, the radio operations), and the production drew on extensive interviews with survivors. Michael Nyqvist, in one of his last roles before his death in 2017, plays the Schäfer character with an unsettling charisma. The film had real political consequences in Germany and Chile, where its release renewed public attention on the unfinished Colonia Dignidad prosecutions.