A documentary by Patricio Guzmán. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Fans of Terrence Malick and timeless images of nature and space should catch The Pearl Button, a leisurely but pointed meditation on human history. Writer-director Patricio Guzmán has been documenting the chaos in his native country ever since he launched his three-part The Battle of Chile, not long after the 1973 coup in which Nixon and Kissinger helped replace the legally elected president with a murderous regime whose crimes are still being tallied.

That’s only the most recent of Chile’s serious nightmares. Europeans systematically wiped out an indigenous population that was better positioned than missionaries and miners to understand the fragile, far-flung resources of a nation over 4,000 kilometres long and, in some places, only a few kilometres wide. In the far south, the country dissolves into thousands of islands. But Guzmán, turning to oceans instead of the desert he explored in Nostalgia for the Light, contends that Chileans turned their back on the Pacific, strip-mining and clear-cutting their way into endless crisis. “Water,” he asserts in his surprisingly soothing narration, “is the intermediary force between the planets and us.”

The tiny item of the title was purportedly paid to the mother of an aboriginal boy, later renamed Jemmy Button, to take him across the Atlantic to England in 1830 for a “proper” education. (Intriguingly, he sailed on the HMS Beagle, one year before Darwin’s world-changing voyage. The father of evolution subsequently met the disillusioned lad, by then in an unfortunately devolved state.) Although these background stories are tragic, Guzmán draws obvious inspiration from the native people who’ve managed to keep some of their ancient, Earth-respecting ways alive. Only 82 minutes long, this Button’s a must-see for anyone who wants to understand the importance of First Nations’ contributions to life on the planet—wherever we live.