Focusing mainly on two films by Patricio Guzmán, produced in Chile after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) - Chile, obstinate memory (1997) and Nostalgia for the Light (2010), we comment on how he develops a personal and subjective narrative with a particular attention to the memory of his country s and people s past. His films bring out - and that is what we call the archeological gesture - not only narratives which are buried in the memories of the interviewees and had been kept untold (out of reach particularly of the new generation), but also objects like old vivid mural pictures covered up by a non-descriptive coat of paint, as well as remains and ruins of the arid landscape of the Atacama desert, letting reemerge experiences and versions of the past, though still strongly present, lives of suffering. It was mainly when we describe in detail and attentively comment on important sequences of these two films that we succeeded in showing how they obstinately resist and revert the forgetting and obliteration of the accommodating official story.