Primera Identidad (First Identity)

During Chile’s dictatorship (1973-1990), hundreds of children were stolen and illegally adopted. Now adults, they search to rebuild their stories — a work on identity, memory, and the lingering echo of displacement.

During the military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), hundreds of children were separated from their families through a network of irregular adoptions that operated with the complicity of state, religious, and medical institutions. Many were sent abroad without their mothers’ consent or knowledge. Decades later, those sons and daughters—now adults—begin a painful, fragmented, and often solitary search to uncover their history, their name, their origin.
This ongoing documentary project focuses on them: on those who seek answers and rebuild their biographies from incomplete archives, torn photographs, borrowed memories, and familial silences. Through images and testimonies, I aim to accompany that intimate and political journey, to record the passage between uprooting and memory, and to shape a visual narrative about a still open wound in Chile’s recent history.
The first chapter was created in Australia with Carmen, a woman who discovered in adulthood that she had been illegally adopted. The second case was documented in Chile with Lyli, who also learned later in life that she had been taken as a baby from the south of the country and adopted by a family unaware of her true origins. The next chapters will continue in Europe.
This work seeks not only to shed light on one of the lesser-known aspects of Chile’s dictatorial trauma, but also to accompany—through image—the act of identity reconstruction of those still searching for their truth.