The World We Live In

In this episode of The World We Live In, viewers are taken to Chile for a look at the people, culture, and industry of the South American country. The episode opens with a shot of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Footage shows the expansive desert, and a bus drives through it along a dirt highway. An oasis sits with the snow-covered Andes looming in the background (02:28). In the Atacamenos village in the oasis, men herd sheep and llamas. Others harvest a dried fungus to use for fuel. Several men stand at a small mine out in the desert (03:50). In the desert town of Andacollo (04:23), a religious procession for the Virgen de Andacollo takes place. Children play flutes and drums, and men march in procession to the town’s church. The film then takes viewers to Chuquicamata, an open pit copper mine (05:24). Dynamite is used to blast rock in the mining operation. A giant shovel moves the copper ore onto a train’s freight cars. The episode shows a copper processing plant (07:22) where plates are melted down into pure copper. At an iron-ore mine (08:10), a giant shovel moves the ore. Viewers then see a nitrate deposit that is being mined (08:48). At a nitrate processing plant (09:28), nitrate is treated with a chemical a bath, heated, and poured into carts for shipping as refined nitrate. Men move sacks of the processed nitrate off a conveyer belt. The film concludes with footage of a square in the center of a city (10:46), a park outside of Valparaiso, the O’Higgins Hotel, Valparaiso’s beaches, and, finally, scenes from Chile’s capital city, Santiago, which include a horse racetrack, a crowded swimming pool, a hospital, a university, and government buildings.