El cantor

This East Germany production from 1973 is about the the life and times of Victor Jara, a popular socialist singer and songwriter from Chile who was an important supporter of the left-winged communist government of president Allende before brutal dictator Pinochet became the leader of the country in 1973 and Allende and Jara were brutally killed during the violent revolution riots.

The films was written and directed by Dean Reed (who also plays Jara), a popular communist American singer and actor who left the United States and became a citizen of the German Democratic Republic in the early seventies and did many records and films with one-sided anti-west propaganda messages.

"El Cantor" from 1978 is one of them, and it's an interesting biography of a political icon of the cold war era, but it's also too biased, naive and sometimes even ridiculous. The acting isn't also the best except for Dean's solid performance of a broken hero, and the musical scored features lots of Jara's hymns and ballads and a strange synthesized-action score. The typical tidy German "Reihenhaus" suburbs are not a really suitable background for the exotic plains and mountains of Santiago de Chile, and all in all this film is really dated, but still an interesting remain of a long forgotten country and era.