SANTIAGO?A new film by a renowned Chilean director focuses on a Tierra del Fuego island prison, a sort of "Guantanamo Bay" jail for political dissidents who endured hellish conditions there 35 years ago.

Dawson Island, located at the western entrance to the Straights of Magellan, was home for more than a year to 99 politicians and personalities close to the deposed socialist government of president Salvador Allende.

"Dawson - Island 10," a film by Oscar-nominated Chilean director Miguel Littin, is based largely on the autobiography of Sergio Bitar, Allende's minister of mining.

Soon after the September 11, 1973 coup Bitar was bundled off to the bleak, wind-swept island located some 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) south of the capital Santiago.

Bitar, now 69 and Minister of Public Works in President Michelle Bachelet's center-left government, was assigned the number 10 of the movie title.

More than 3,000 people were killed or went "missing" during Chile's 1973-1990 military dictatorship, while some 28,000 others were tortured.

In 1974 the regime released Bitar, who spent the remaining dictatorship years in exile in the United States and Venezuela.

Bitar was visibly moved when he saw the movie at an early screening on Tuesday.

"I'm happy that something that I wrote for my children, in exile, thinking only of them, makes it to the big screen," Bitar told reporters.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, herself a victim of the military regime -- she was tortured in Santiago after the coup -- was also impressed by the movie.

"The film captures very well" the feeling of the time, Bachelet said.

"But beyond that one is left speechless because it allows us to live the emotions, pain, and strength of those men and women," she said.

Littin filmed the movie on Dawson Island in September 2008, documenting the same late winter conditions that the political prisoners would have experienced in 1973.

The director made his mark in 1985 when he sneaked into Chile on a high-risk mission to film life under the iron-fisted regime of General Augusto Pinochet.

Littin was nominated twice for an Oscar in the Foreign Film category -- in 1976 for "Actas de Marusia," about Chilean saltpeter workers, and in 1983 for "Alsino and the Condor," about the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

"Dawson - Island 10" also revives an old controversy: was president Allende murdered as he holed up at the La Moneda presidential palace during the bloody September 11 coup? Or did he commit suicide, as his relatives insist?

Military jets dropped bombs on La Moneda just before soldiers stormed the building during the coup.

A suicide in those circumstances "is a heroic act, but the assassination of a president is something else, an atrocity," Littin said.

"What happened in Chile was not something between good guys and bad guys, it was not black and white.

"It was something involving human beings that chose one option or the other. Some were prisoners and the others oppressors, but life is much more complex than those distinctions," Littin said.