Valeria Sarmiento

Valeria Sarmiento (born 29 October 1948) is a film editor, director and screenwriter best known for her work in France, Portugal and her native Chile. She has worked both in film and television, directing 20 feature films, documentaries and television series'. She is the widow of Chilean film director Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011) with whom she collaborated for decades as regular editor and co-writer. She has also edited films for Luc Moullet, Robert Kramer and Ventura Pons . From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Works

Traces

A journey back to the darkest years of the military dictatorship, where Valeria Sarmiento, using for the first time in her career her own voice, reflects on the traces of the political violence of that period and summons the testimony of victims and privileged witnesses, but also the opinion of scientists, memory theorists and researchers of genocides of other times. The result is an intimate account of how these traces have impregnated our life stories, our bodies and also our landscape.

Release Date:2023-10-19

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Socialist Realism

A satirical take on President Salvador Allende's Popular Unity process prior to the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The film is made up of a series of short stories, in which different worlds cross paths.

Release Date:2023-09-23

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:2

A Man, When He Is a Man

What are the social climate and cultural traditions in Costa Rica which nurture "machismo" and allow the domination of women to continue in Latin America?

Release Date:2023-04-09

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:2

The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror

A man whose wife has committed suicide, appears to him as a ghost. The ghost follows him everywhere, under the bed, under tables… After seeing the ghost so frequently, the man begins to resemble her.

Release Date:2020-02-21

Department:Writing

Job:Co-Writer

Vote Count:7

Casa de Angelis

The trials and tribulations of a fashion house in 1950s Chile.

Release Date:2018-11-18

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Episode Count:10

The Black Book

The story of the adventures, in the twilight of the eighteenth century, of a singular couple formed by a little orphan with mysterious origins and his young Italian nurse of a similarly uncertain birth. They lead us in their wake, from Rome to Paris, from Lisbon to London, from Parma to Venice. Always followed in the shadows, for obscure reasons, by a suspicious-looking Calabrian and a troubling cardinal, they make us explore the dark intrigues of the Vatican, the pangs of a fatal passion, a gruesome duel, banter at the court of Versailles and the convulsions of the French Revolution.

Release Date:2018-10-03

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:21

The Wandering Soap Opera

The film revolves around the concept of soap opera. Its structure is based on the assumption that Chilean reality does not exist, but rather is an ensemble of soap operas.

Release Date:2017-08-10

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:12

Maria Graham: Diary of a Residence in Chile

Historical drama adapted from the diary of the famous British travel-writer Maria Graham who arrived in Chile in 1822 just as the country was becoming independent from Spain. She is a woman coming to terms with her husband’s recent death: In her discovery of this breathtakingly beautiful country, its people and its customs, she learns to live again.

Release Date:2013-03-02

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Episode Count:2

Lines of Wellington

Passionate romance, brutal treachery, and selfless nobility are set against the background of Napoleon’s 1810 invasion of Portugal.

Release Date:2012-10-04

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:42

A Closed Book

Jane appears to be ideal: attractive, intelligent, unruffled by her employer's abrupt eccentricities. But, gradually, we come aware that Jane has another agenda. Incrementally, Sir Paul's familiar surroundings are altered. His housekeeper is diverted away, strange things happen around the house and he becomes increasingly dependent on his new assistant.

Release Date:2012-07-13

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:19

Night Across the Street

A drama centered on an office worker on the verge of retirement who begins to relive both real and imagined memories.

Release Date:2012-07-11

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:16

Mysteries of Lisbon

The tragic story of the many lives of Father Dinis, his dark origins and his pious works, and the different fates of all those who, trapped in a sinister web of love, hate and crime, cross paths with him through years of adventure and misfortune in the convulsed Europe of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (A longer television version of the film of the same name, released in 2010.)

Release Date:2011-05-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Episode Count:6

Vote Count:9

Mysteries of Lisbon

Release Date:2010-10-20

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:74

Nucingen House

Surreal gothic comedy about a gambler who wins a strange Chilean mansion and takes his frail wife there.

Release Date:2009-06-03

Department:Costume & Make-Up

Job:Costume Design

Vote Count:7

Secrets

After long decades of exile, a leftist former activist returns to Chile to settle accounts with his conscience, related to the death of a colleague and political hero . The task of Atalibar is to reveal his secret. But his view clashes with the current country, godless, far from the old ideologies and where all his old colleagues have changed.

Release Date:2008-10-09

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:5

Litoral

Series based on tales of sailors, fishermen and people from the coasts and islands of Chile. The episodes revolve around a ghost ship called "Lucerna", where the living are indistinguishable from the dead.

Release Date:2008-09-06

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Episode Count:4

Vote Count:1

La Recta Provincia

This was a man. He lived with his mother. He cared a manor house in the countryside of Chile. One day the man found a bone in the garden. The bone was bored. That was a bone flute. The man with the flute music play. And music song became. The voice of the song begging to seek the other bones of his scattered body. The man and his mother were in those ways of God and hell, looking for the bones that make up the skeleton of that Christian. And give him a Christian burial. And they saw what they saw, they lived what they lived. Many stories lived. And although they did not tell anyone, others told them.

Release Date:2007-08-20

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:6

Klimt

A portrait of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt whose lavish, sexual paintings came to symbolize the art nouveau style of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Release Date:2006-03-03

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:69

The Lost Domain

Set in 1973 during the coup d'etat in Chile, Max recalls his encounters in London during World War II with French aviator Antoine, a childhood hero he first met in his native country one morning in 1932 and who initiated him to the wonders of aviation.

Release Date:2005-06-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:4

A Place Among the Living

A mediocre pulp novelist is approached by a stranger claiming to be a serial killer with a proposition to chronicle his crimes.

Release Date:2003-08-28

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:6

That Day

A father is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage killed by allowing a murderous psychopath to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other.

Release Date:2003-06-04

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:15

Rosa la China

Chilean director Valeria Sarmiento weaves a tale of love, betrayal, and civil unrest centering around a nightclub in 1950s pre-Communist Cuba in her 2002 romantic drama Rosa La China. Notorious businessman Santiago Ordenez (Juan Luis Galiardo), who primarily goes by the nickname Dulzara, operates a high-profile club/casino with the protection of some local politicians with whom he has dubious relationships. A large portion of the club's success is due to its star singer, Rosa (Luisa Maria Jiminez), who also happens to be Dulzara's lover. Rosa, however, has recently started into another affair with a somewhat younger womanizer named Marcos (Abel Rodriguez).

Release Date:2002-09-27

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:4

Savage Souls

At a wake one night in 1945, a group of aged women recall the life of one of their number. Sixty years before, Thérèse was barely 20 years old when she eloped with her boyfriend, Firmin, a blacksmith, to Châtillon, a town in Provence. Here, she makes the acquaintance of the wealthy Madame Numance, who is known for her good deeds. Realising that Thérèse is pregnant and unemployed, Madame Numance insists that she moves into a house on her estate. Whilst Firmin resents the arrangement, Thérèse soon finds that she can exploit the situation, using her benefactor's naivety and generosity for her own gain..

Release Date:2001-05-20

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:10

Love Torn in a Dream

A serious young man of free spirit is forced by his surroundings to become rich at all costs. A group of blind children tries to open the eyes of the unbelievers to the Christian faith. Retired nuns who open a brothel, to pay the running costs of the convent. These rather ironic paradoxes turn this fairytale into a philosophical fable.

Release Date:2000-11-22

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:11

L'Inconnu de Strasbourg

Madeleine is with her lover, Jean-Paul, when her husband arrives home and catches the two together. Madeleine kills her husband and tells Jean-Paul to flee before the police arrive. After Jean-Paul drives away, he picks up a hitchhiker. When the car, stolen by the hitchhiker, explodes, police believe the dead hitchhiker is Jean-Paul. Madeleine takes up with Jean-Paul's brother, Bastien, while Jean-Paul, arriving in Strasbourg, is mistaken for the heir to a fortune. The detective on the case spends more time writing crime novels than investigating real-life crimes.

Release Date:1998-08-19

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:3

The Film to Come

If any single piece can act as a key to Ruiz, it may be the 1997 short Le Film à Venir (The Film to Come). The titular film is a holy fragment of celluloid that can only be seen by a secret society known as the Philokinetes. They watch it on a loop, somnambulating through a life that is unreal by comparison. It is the belief of the Philokinetes that film has an existence “independent from humans. Cinema, they said, is the primeval soup of a new life form. There from were to emerge pure screening creatures. Which is to say, non-topical beings.” - n+1

Release Date:1997-11-16

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:10

Genealogies of a Crime

An attorney defends a young man on trial for killing his aunt — a psychiatrist who took him in to study possible homicidal tendencies.

Release Date:1997-05-04

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:29

Elle

The story of a neurotic bachelor who, after marrying a beautiful woman, submits her to increasingly deranged accusations of infidelity and pleas for forgiveness.

Release Date:1996-06-12

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:1

Wind Water

In Wind Water, Ruiz stages a three-way dialogue between three great cultures: the West, China and Arabia. He imagines what might occur if Shih-T’ao’s six poetic procedures for attaining the primal respiration or cosmic breath in painting were applied to one of the flagships of Western art, Velazquez’s Las Meninas. Ruiz wants the three cultures to interact and test each other like the paper, stone and scissors of the children’s game. The result is an insoluble dispute, a différend. No reconciliation or compromise is possible between these cultural outlooks.

Release Date:1995-01-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:1

The Clandestine Journey: Lives of Saints and Sinners

A surreal travel drama, shot on Sicility with Italian actors. IlViaggio Clandestino is a film about saints and sinners. Whether you areblessed or doomed is often dependent on someone's soul that on whether theypray or suffer. The kindred spirit of San Gil ! the Holy Gil ! is CiccioBavaria who, unilke the former, continues to seek sin. For Bavaria sin isliberating and dynamic. The film tells the story of the journey made by thesetwo protagonists; a journey that leads to the demise of San Gil, while Bavariais reincarnated as Buddha. There is another traveller, a clandestinetraveller. Christ, always fleeing the angels. This Christ does not helphumanity with miracles, but by keeping himself alive as best he can givingweather forecasts.In this strange sainty story, Ruiz allowed himself ot be inspired byapocryphal books about saints of flesh and blood.

Release Date:1994-01-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

The Solitudes

Chile is seen through the eyes of a Chinese painter - a traditional painter who uses the concepts of XVIII century Shih-T'ao.

Release Date:1992-10-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:1

Amelia Lópes O'Neill

A well-bred young woman who prizes the virtue of fidelity remains faithful to the doctor who deflowers her, even after he marries her invalid sister.

Release Date:1992-02-05

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:4

Planet of the Children

Documentary about Cuban education. El planeta de los niños is not a documentary and not a feature film. Sarmiento actually filmed a documentary subject with the mise-en-scène and the cutting of a feature film. Without further ado, she takes the viewer into a world where adults would appear to have died out ; a society within which all functions and professions are held by children with deadly seriousness as if things have always been this way. Only right at the end does Sarmiento reveal that she shot the film at the 'Escuele de Pioneros' set up in Cuba in 1979, an institution which Fidel Castro gave to the children of his people to prepare themselves for a later working life. The film opens with an as-good-as-real wedding ceremony and progresses via a birth to a simulated battle ; from birth to death. The subtle irony with which Sarmiento portrays this 'Utopian' world was not understood by all German critics.

Release Date:1992-01-02

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:1

Three Crowns of the Sailor

Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story.

Release Date:1991-10-04

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:34

Brise-glace

Collaborative experimental project on which three director made different films about the Swedish icebreaker "Frej".

Release Date:1990-09-05

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:4

L'Autel de l'amitié

A series of philosophical dialogues on friendship, architecture, electricity, cannibalism and human rights.

Release Date:1989-10-10

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Derrière le Mur

Adaptation of a choreography by Joêlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia

Release Date:1989-01-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Tous les nuages sont des horloges

Release Date:1988-01-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

The Blind Owl

H., 35, an Arabian immigrant, works as projectionist in an old cinema. One day, drawn by the music, he looks through the window of the booth and is fascinated: the dancer he sees on the screen seems to be looking straight into his eyes. He falls in love with her, but the vision last only a moment. Shortly afterwards, an elderly man storms into the projection booth and claims he is his uncle.  H. wants to prepare a meal for him and reaches for the oil bottle: he sees the same dancer on the label…. H begins to find echoes of his own life in the images he projects. Everything changes when fiction and reality merge...

Release Date:1987-12-31

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:7

Brise-Glace: Histoires de glace

Third and final part of collaborative project Brise Glace. Directed by Raúl Ruíz.

Release Date:1987-12-15

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:1

Boucherie fine

A butcher whose meat is most tender, surrounded successively by ephemeral and delightful cashiers.

Release Date:1987-01-01

Department:Crew

Job:Thanks

Vote Count:1

Dans un miroir

A man comes to visit an acquaintance who is supposed to be sick and talks to his sister while he is waiting.

Release Date:1986-01-02

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Treasure Island

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.

Release Date:1986-01-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:10

Notre mariage

A sickly young girl is given away by her father to a childless couple. Twenty years later, she marries her adopted father.

Release Date:1985-04-01

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:1

Voyage of a Hand

In Voyage of a Hand, Ruiz constructs another of his concentric labyrinths that hits us right in the multifaceted center of our confusion. We might decide that what we receive was a story full of intentions; or we might decide that it was a spineless joke empty of sense or direction. In any case, it will be difficult to deny the acid sense of humor that animates the film.

Release Date:1984-07-18

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Character:

Vote Count:8

City of Pirates

A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.

Release Date:1984-02-22

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:41

Les Minutes d'un faiseur de film

A short personal filmed journal about the director's nervousness in presenting a script and awaiting the decision about whether it can be made.

Release Date:1983-10-07

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:2

On Top of the Whale

A parody of anthropology, linguistics, and cultural imperialism. The film follows an unlikely team of linguists into the wilds of an ersatz Patagonia to study the last speakers of a dying language. That language apparently consists of a single word, which therefore means everything.

Release Date:1982-02-04

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:12

The Territory

A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods. Foolishly unprepared to deal with Mother Nature and their situation, they wander around lost for days and weeks, becoming more and more fatigued, hungry, and desperate. A brief encounter with a pair of epicureans on a bridge fails to garner them any of the gluttons' feast due to a language barrier. Eventually their party begins to die, and the survivors ration their meat among them, attaching a religious-type ritual to its dispensation.

Release Date:1981-09-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:10

Guns

The film concerns a group of disparate types who support themselves by running guns to the Arabs. On the surface, it would seem that these characters are bad guys. In fact, the guns are to be used by a resistance group who hope to continue shipping oil to the West, despite the despotic curbs imposed upon fuel shipments by their leaders.

Release Date:1980-11-18

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:4

Of Great Events and Ordinary People

In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in Paris’ eleventh arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ‘60s. Its political content is deliberately left negligible: it’s hard to tell at the end who did actually win the election, let alone why.

Release Date:1980-02-24

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:5

The One-Eyed Man

With his body now devoid of substance and able to fly, N. wanders looking for a way to return to life and reintegrate into the world.

Release Date:1980-01-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Dog's Dialogue

A charming tale of murder, perversity and narrative echoes told through shots of barking dogs and a La jetée-like series of stills.

Release Date:1979-05-17

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:27

Origins of a Meal

Bananas, eggs, and tuna: three basic foodstuffs with three wildly different points of origin. Moullet begins with these on his plate but constructs his film by working backwards and finding the sources for these items and how they reach our plates. As Moullet’s investigation deepens, however, the film moves beyond the confines of a simple exploration of food origins into more political and social realms, not only relating to food but also to the medium of film.

Release Date:1979-02-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:7

The Suspended Vocation

The film centers on a Dominican monk named Jérôme (played by one actor in colour and another actor in black-and-white) and his interactions with various higher-ups within the French Catholic Church. Ruiz's intention was to reflect the ideological arguments that plagued Latin American left-wing political parties.

Release Date:1978-07-27

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:6

Ocaña: An Intermittent Portrait

A sincere portrait, and in first person, of the multifaceted Andalusian artist José Pérez Ocaña.

Release Date:1978-06-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:8

Sotelo

A documentary on the exiled Chilean painter Sotelo which focuses on the painter's voice rather than the paintings themselves.

Release Date:1976-01-01

Department:Sound

Job:Sound

Dialogues of the Exiles

Chilean exiles in Paris discuss the problems facing them. They kidnap and attempt to re-educate a touring singer from their fatherland.

Release Date:1975-04-23

Department:Production

Job:Producer

Character:

Vote Count:5

Detrás de la lluvia

A brutal sexual murder of a minor revolts the anger of the town. On the other hand, a psychologist, Sofia Belmar is not only shocked by the event, but this also brings back some of her more gruesome memories.

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Utopia: The Scattered Body and the World Upside Down

Two salesmen in Honduras are looking everywhere for their lost pal.

Release Date:1976-07-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:8

La Femme au foyer

The life of a right-wing housewife in Chile during the prior days to Salvador Allende's military overthrow.

Release Date:1975-04-04

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:1

Les transplantés

A right-wing family decides to exile themselves to Europe after Salvador Allende's victory during the presidential elections of 1970; only to find themselves losing their comfortable socio-economic status and be subjected to a dramatic proletarianization that will lead them to all kinds of struggles.

Release Date:1975-01-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:1

The Expropriation

The film captures the activities of the inhabitants in the countryside, in southern Chile, and the CORA (Corporation for Agrarian Reform). Although the action was filmed in four days and four nights in 1971, the movie was only finished in France in 1973, after the military coup.

Release Date:1974-01-01

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:6

A Dream as in Colours

Sarmiento made her directorial debut with the documentary with this short about a group of Chilean women dedicated to striptease.

Release Date:1973-08-02

Department:Directing

Job:Director