Valeria Sarmiento

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 Date1975-04-23

DepartmentProduction

JobProducer

Charactersd

Vote Count5

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 Date1984-07-18

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Charactersd

Vote Count8

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 Date1997-05-04

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count29

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 Date1985-04-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count2

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 Date1984-02-22

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count41

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 Date1986-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count10

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 Date2001-05-20

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count11

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 Date1974-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count6

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 Date2007-08-20

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count6

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 Date1991-10-04

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count35

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 Date2023-04-09

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count3

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 Date1978-07-27

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count6

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 Date2000-11-22

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count11

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 Date1979-02-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count8

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 Date2023-09-23

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count4

Tous les nuages sont des horloges

A country house in the evening. A couple returns home to find a bailiff inside, busy taking inventory.

Release Date1988-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

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 Date2003-06-04

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count16

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 Date2012-07-11

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count17

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 Date2002-09-27

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count5

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.

Release Date2010-10-21

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count2

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 Date1992-02-05

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count5

Lines of Wellington

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

Release Date2012-10-04

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count44

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 Date1983-10-07

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count3

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 Date1975-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count1

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 Date1986-01-02

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

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 Date2005-06-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count4

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 Date1996-06-12

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count2

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 Date1998-08-19

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count3

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 Date1987-12-31

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count7

Brise-Glace: Histoires de glace

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

Release Date1987-12-15

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count1

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.

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

The Territory

A small group of well-to-do vacationers go on a hiking trip into the woods just to find themselves mysteriously lost.

Release Date1981-09-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count10

La Femme au foyer

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

Release Date1975-04-04

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

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 Date1980-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

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 Date2011-05-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Episode Count6

Vote Count12

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 Date2006-03-03

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count74

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 Date1997-11-16

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count10

Nucingen House

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

Release Date2009-06-03

DepartmentCostume & Make-Up

JobCostume Design

Vote Count8

Casa de Angelis

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

Release Date2018-11-18

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Episode Count10

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 Date1994-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

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 Date1980-11-18

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count4

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 Date2018-09-06

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count14

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 Date2008-10-09

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count6

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 Date1980-02-24

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count5

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 Date1995-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count1

Boucherie fine

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

Release Date1987-01-01

DepartmentCrew

JobThanks

Vote Count1

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 Date1982-02-04

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count12

Brise-glace

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

Release Date1990-09-05

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count4

L'Autel de l'amitié

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

Release Date1989-10-10

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Utopia: The Scattered Body and the World Upside Down

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

Release Date1976-07-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count8

Derrière le Mur

Adaptation of a choreography by Joêlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia

Release Date1989-01-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

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 Date1992-01-02

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

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 Date2008-09-06

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Episode Count4

Vote Count1

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 Date2007-08-20

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Episode Count4

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 Date2013-03-02

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Episode Count2

Ocaña: An Intermittent Portrait

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

Release Date1978-06-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count9

The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror

A man's wife commits suicide and 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 Date2020-02-21

DepartmentWriting

JobCo-Writer

Vote Count8

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 Date2003-08-28

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count6

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 Date2012-07-13

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count23

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 Date2018-10-03

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count22

The Solitudes

"At that time (late 1992), I made a film for British television, Channel 4, called Las Soledades, the name of a long poem by Góngora. It was made in Chile, using many poetic elements of the country. Chile is seen through the eyes of a Chinese painter—a painter who uses the traditional 18th-century concepts of Shih-Tao. Once again, I am doing something that, apparently, is not meant to go hand in hand. The landscape of my country, southern Chile, where I was born, initially provokes in me a feeling of fear. The landscape is madness. In these crazy landscapes, you can find very reasonable people, which makes the landscape seem even crazier."

Release Date1992-10-01

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count1

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 Date1973-08-02

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Sotelo

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

Release Date1976-01-01

DepartmentSound

JobSound

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 Date2023-10-19

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

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 Date1987-11-13

DepartmentEditing

JobEditor

Vote Count29