Director Patricio Guzman gives us the moon and stars and the desolate romance of a place called the Atacma Desert in Chile. In a place where there is no moisture, you can touch the stars through the clear skies, looking into the light sent out into the galaxy in a distant past and you can also find the aching despair of people, mostly women, searching for what remains.

Remnants of light and life at the topic of Guzman’s “Nostalgia for the Light.” From the stars and moon, we hear Guzman’s clear voice  recalling, “The old German telescope that I’ve seen once again after so many years, is still working in Santiago, Chile.  I owe my passion for astronomy to it.” Who would have thought there could be such beauty in seeing the telescope that brings us messages from the past?

From there Guzman transports us to a recreation, objects beautifully lit that illustrate a comfy middle class house. This is presented like a slide show and he tells us these could have been from his old house at a time when he passed out of childhood, when Santiago was sleeping.

A time when the president walked unescorted in the streets, before a revolution “swept us to the center of the world,” before Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship would leave many people missing, so many that no one seems to know the exact number and yet their bodies cannot be found.

Astronomers might love science fiction, but they look at the stars to learn about the past and perhaps comprehend the origin of our own solar system.  In this sense they are archeologists of the skies. The Atacama Desert has such clear skies that they can “touch the sky.”

Guzman shows us the contrast between the desolate daytime landscape and the night sky. City dwellers like most viewers will find themselves introduced to a foreign sight: the stars as bright as light bulbs.

Chacabuco was an abandoned town, a ghost town twice over. It once served as a home for workers in nitrate mines until synthetic nitrate shut down the industry. The workers were kept in near-slavery there. In 1973, after his military coup, Pinochet turned Chacabuco into a concentration camp just two years after then-president Salvador Allende had declared it a historic monument. As prison, Chacabuco held doctors, lawyers, writers, artists and other intellectuals–as many as 1,800.

In Chacabuco, the prisoners were also enchanted with the sky. Studying astronomy under the guidance of Dr. Alvarez, a group of about 20 prisoners could for a while have “a feeling of great freedom,” according to a Chacabuco survivor Luís Henríquez. The military eventually banned their lessons as if determined to force minds to wither from lack of stimulation. There were others who became secret historians and illustrators. Miguel Lawner was determined to remember  this life at these camps by memorizing details with an architect’s precision, drawing them and then ripping up the works that he had already committed to memory. Once free, he began drawing. Guzman shows him drawing a diagram as a witness to a grim history that many would rather forget.

Not all survived the camps and the desert became a temporary burying ground. Some women still search for their loved ones finding nothing or even just fragments. Vicky Saavedra finds a foot, only one foot of her brother. How is this possible? That is explained, but what isn’t is where is the rest of his body? No one knows and many remains of the disappeared are still unaccounted for.

Some have mercifully forgotten such as Henríquez’s wife, Anita, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. The comparison is obvious: To forget the painful past is to be crippled and only partially conscious of the reality of life because “those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moments. Those who have none don’t live anywhere.”

I wish I could appreciate the Spanish, but such care was taken in the English subtitles that the original language must be beautiful as well. This poignant contemplation of history, astronomy and the Atacma Desert is well worth watching more than once. The premise reminded me of “The City Dark” and both documentaries are strong and yet have a dreamy quality to them, blending artistry and historical facts to force us to think and perhaps even change. “The City Dark” looks toward the future and regrets a lost past; “Nostalgia for the Light” recalls the sorrow of the recent past, remembering the serenity of childhood, but wanting us to recall the painful past in order to truly live in the present.

“Nostalgia for the Light” premieres tonight, 25 October 2012 on PBS. You can view it online from 26 October to 21 November, 2012. In Spanish with English subtitles.