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Document of the month

November 2024

After the world premiere last year of Socialist Realism (El realismo socialista) at the San Sebastian Festival, an unfinished feature film shot in 1973 and interrupted by Pinochet’s coup d’état, it is worth looking back over the steps of the Chilean filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento, who has permeated the last forty years of the San Sebastian Festival’s history.

After winning the Donostia Grand Prize for New Directors with her second fiction feature Notre Marriage in 1984, an edition in which she was also part of Guadalupe Echeverria’s pioneering initiative with her video City of Pirates (La Ville des Pirates) with Raúl Ruiz, Sarmiento returned in 1988 to participate with her documentary A Man, When He Is a Man (El hombre cuando es hombre, 1982) in the retrospective cycle ABC de América Latina. Her ironic portrayal of the Costa Rican social climate and cultural traditions that enable misogyny and the domination of women led Sarmiento to be declared persona non grata in Costa Rica.

The Festival archive records a letter that the director of the Festival Diego Galán addressed the following year to his ‘friend’, exiled in Paris since the Chilean civil-military coup, to request her collaboration in setting up a cycle that sought to review the genre of melodrama in Latin America. In his letter Galán alludes to the degree of knowledge of Sarmiento, who had often quoted paradigmatic fragments of the genre through his films.

In the following decades, Sarmiento returned to Donostia with up to two films in the Official Selection (Elle in 1995 and Le Cahier Noir in 2018) and with the first miniseries in the history of the section as editor of Mistérios de Lisboa (Raúl Ruiz, 2010). As an editor, Sarmiento had also participated in 1978 in the historic production by Ventura Pons, Ocaña, retrat intermitent, a documentary premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in a climate of upheaval marked by the changes brought about by the Spanish Transition.

In 1998, Sarmiento was a member of the Official Jury of the 46th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival, sharing the task with producer Jeremy Thomas, filmmakers Julian Schnabel and Jerzy Skolimowski, actresses and directors Valeria Golino and Patricia Reyes Spíndola and writer and journalist Manuel Rivas.

Photographs

Portrait of director Valeria Sarmiento

Identity statement area

ID: 37758

Catalogue number: F0054

Location: C2C/B6/M2/N7

Title: Portrait of director Valeria Sarmiento

Date: 1988-09-15 – 1988-09-24

Level of description: Simple documentary unit

Technical description area

Medium: Paper

Binder: Gelatina

Image-forming element: Plata

Colour: B/W

Positive/negative: Positive

Context area

Producer: San Sebastian International Film Festival

Photographer: Jesús Uriarte

Place: Donostia-San Sebastián

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer: Producción propia

Content and structure area

Scope and content: Portrait of director Valeria Sarmiento

Places: Donostia-San Sebastián, Gipuzkoa

People: Valeria Sarmiento

Inscriptions: “71/ 13/9 / 9×7 / F1 / Pg6” [Inscripción manuscrita en tinta azul y roja, al verso de la copia]
“Valeria Sarmiento” [Inscripción manuscrita en tinta negra, al recto de la copia]

System of arrangement: Copia perteneciente a un álbum adhesivo, acompañada de dos negativos. Retirada para su correcta conservación. En el sobre de conservación, debajo del EZ (signatura antigua), se ha añadido una numeración correlativa, en este caso el número 55, para conservar el orden original en el que las copias fueron encontradas en el interior del álbum.

Conditions of access and use area

Conditions governing access: Conditions governing access

Conditions governing reproduction: Conditions governing reproduction

State of preservation: Bueno

Allied materials area

Bibliography: Festival (05)

Digitalisation area

Width: 4857 px

Height: 7475 px

Control area

Preservation: Anna Ferrer, Andrea Sánchez, Lorena Soria

Cataloguing: Andrea Sánchez, Lorena Soria

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