VALERIA SARMIENTO

Filmmaker and Ruiz's widow (Chile)

With great surprise and sadness we received the news that the Ministry of Culture, the Arts and Heritage did not grant us the requested aid for post-production in order to finish filmmaker Raúl Ruiz's SOCIALIST REALISM.

As it is known, this film was shot informally in 1972-73 in an experimental spirit and in fragments. With his unique point of view, Ruiz sought to make a record of the turmoil with a paradoxical and ironic twist in order to deconstruct the revolutionary rhetoric and bring together real or supposed elements that, between drama and comedy, lead to a critical distance on that complex scenario with an uncertain future.

It seems appropriate to recall that Chilean films have largely given France and the French a cultural image of our country and its history. This was the case, for example, when the Cinémathèque Française held an 80-film Ruiz retrospective in 2016, and – along with the CNC (Center National du Cinéma) – restored 18 films, receiving a very positive response from the press and the public.

It is important to keep the memory alive of one of the most significant personalities of our culture.

ROGER KOZA

Artistic director (DocBsAs and FICIC), programmer (Viennale and Filmfest Hamburg), and film critic (Ñ Magazine, La Voz del Interior and Con los ojos abiertos)

Let's imagine that a lost manuscript by Jorge Luis Borges from 1950 entitled "On Injury in the Art of Moving Images" had been found a few months ago among the papers forgotten by the writer at a friend's house in Geneva. Such a find would be cause for celebration; not only for the Argentinian people, but for all those who value literature as a triumph of the spirit over mere survival, since a life without novels, poems or treatises would not be very different from a life form devoid of that which defines our way of being in the world.

Who could decide not to contribute financial resources to edit that lost work? Any man or woman, and even more so, any Ministry of Culture of any country would find the resources to make its publication possible. Would it not? Is it necessary to give explanations?

The filmmaker Raúl Ruiz is to cinema what Borges is to world literature: a miracle of the South, a phenomenon that elevates the spiritual life of a country and a horizon that his contemporaries see as a kind of pinnacle of the culture of a people. They were geniuses, no doubt, but their ostensible genius was never unrelated to the country in which they learned to think and feel, or to film and write. Neither Borges nor Ruiz was foreign to the destiny of his respective country.

The fact that the different offices that provide resources to Chilean filmmakers have denied financial assistance to Valeria Sarmiento and her team to finish Socialist Realism, a film that was never properly seen because it never reached its final cut, is unacceptable. It's a scandal!

It cannot be that something like this happens and that not even death gives Ruiz the respect he deserves. It is rabidly inadmissible, although it is not a surprise either. The contempt for the highest life of the spirit is a reiterated gesture on the part of those who hold power and almost always decide the budget allocations for the creators of culture and their works, which they do not know or hardly value.

Let's hope that the various government offices will revisit the decision. The Chileans, Argentinians, French, Germans, Chinese, Taiwanese, and even the inhabitants of Andromeda will be happy to know that Socialist Realism will be known as it was conceived. It would be an act of sensible judgment in the service of lucidity. It would be an act of benevolence towards freedom that Ruiz knew how to honor in every shot he filmed and in every word he spoke.

EVA SANGIORGI

Artistic Director of Viennale

In the times we're living in, where democracies totter in every corner of the globe, and people have no alternative but to take to the streets so that their voices can be heard, the work of Raúl Ruiz reverberates like a message that is shouted in the present day.

Socialist Realism is an expected and due work, now as much as it was at the time it was born.

With Valeria Sarmiento involved in the project, it can be rescued and finally returned to our community: the same one that has inspired it and the new one that now needs it.

We will recognize ourselves in, and allow ourselves to be surprised by, his visionary lucidity that today becomes a reading of our history.

DENNIS LIN

Artistic Director, Lincoln Center / New York Film Festival

It is regrettable that the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of Chile has decided not to provide essential financial support for the efforts to complete the legendary Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s unfinished film, Socialist Realism. Fans and scholars of Ruiz’s work around the world are eagerly awaiting the film’s completion by Ruiz’s close longtime collaborator and wife Valeria Sarmiento, in no small part due to the extraordinary work that Sarmiento and her collaborators have recently undertaken with two other previously unfinished films by Ruiz, The Wandering Soap Opera and The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, both of which count as revelatory contributions to our understanding of the arc of Ruiz's artistic career. Ruiz’s oeuvre is one of the most sprawling, singular and influential bodies of work in all of world cinema, and the possibility of that body expanding to include the films that the hyper-prolific Ruiz himself was unable to complete during his lifetime is not just immensely exciting, it is a fundamentally Ruizian enterprise in the best sense. It is our hope that Sarmiento and Poetastros will find the support they require. Many of us await Socialist Realism’s belated completion with great enthusiasm and hope.

ADRIAN MARTIN

Film critic

2021 marks the 10th anniversary of the passing of one of cinema's greatest and most imaginative artists, Raúl Ruiz. His voluminous film work from the early 1960s to 2011 changed the course of cinema, and has inspired many artists in all media. As well, his work across different media (TV, installation, theatre) and his magnificent writings have helped to expand our understanding of the arts. Many Chileans are deeply proud of Ruiz and his legacy – someone who joined the ranks of the exiled in the 1970s and established a remarkable career for himself in France and then all over the world. Yet in March 2021, the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts & Heritage has rejected all proposals to fund the completion of Ruiz's project EL REALISMO SOCIALISTA (1973) by his brilliant wife Valeria Sarmiento and the production team at Poetastros. How can this be? The project will complete a trilogy, after the wonderful reconstructions of THE WANDERING TELENOVELA and THE TANGO OF THE WIDOWER AND ITS DISTORTING MIRRIR, films that have been screened and acclaimed all over the world in recent years, keeping Ruiz at the centre of discussion of cinema. There is already enormous interest from top-level festivals in EL REALISMO SOCIALISTA. The money must be found to bring the project to fulfilment. I enthusiastically support every effort to complete this important project, and I categorically denounce the foolish, negative decision of the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts & Heritage.

RAÚL CAMARGO

Artistic Director of the Valdivia International Film Festival (Chile)

In 2019 I published the following article, dismayed by the news that the Chilean Audiovisual Fund had not granted financial support to The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Raúl Ruiz's first feature film:

Columna de Raúl Camargo, Director Festival de Cine de Valdivia - Cuestionamientos a los Fondos de Cultura

It is difficult to add words to what was already expressed that year, as it was difficult to think that once again the State of Chile’s public grant to finance the national audiovisual sector would deny funds to a new project to rescue his work.

However, and given the seriousness of the current situation, once again we are starting a campaign that allows Socialist Realism to be finalized.

The world’s cinephiles are mobilized as a result of this situation that they rule incomprehensible, not understanding how the possibility of a new film by the greatest Chilean filmmaker in history is not a matter of State in Chile.

I would just like to add a reflection to what was already expressed two years ago: Socialist Realism, like The Wandering Soap Opera and The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, is the conjunction of Raúl Ruiz's point of view with that of Valeria Sarmiento, nothing less than the most important female Chilean filmmaker, a pioneering and advanced director with a filmography characterized by the acuity of seeing beyond what is evident, working against the official position, the ability to review and question pre-established roles, female protagonism outside the norm, and the representation of the Ibero-American reality using popular codes to give them a new reading. Added to the unfortunate invisibility of her work and its importance is the failure to award funds to continue with Raúl Ruiz's film today.

Chile has the possibility of a double cinematographic miracle of global reach under the Ruiz & Sarmiento signature. We hope that the State is up to the task and does not commit a double invisibilization. Nicanor Parra once said, "We believe we are a country, and the truth is that we are just a landscape." Thanks to the mobilized citizenship, we are on the verge of constituting a new country with the hope that Parra's sentence is just a verse and not reality. Today is the time to stop sentencing culture.

GONZALO DE PEDRO AMATRIA

Artistic Director of the Madrid International Film Festival (España)

The body of work of Raúl Ruiz is not only one of the most unique and surprising in the entire Latin American cinematographic universe, but also worldwide. And it is also a constant source of surprise: even after his death, as if he were a character in one of his films, Ruiz continues to send films: unfinished, lost, unedited, which, thanks to the tireless effort of Poetastros and Valeria Sarmiento, continue to complete what seems like an ever-growing filmography. That a project as relevant, long-awaited, and unique as Socialist Realism has not obtained public support to be completed in its country is dramatic and symptomatic. But Raúl is alive, and this film, like so many others, will end up being real in the face of institutional blindness.

CECILIA BARRIONUEVO

Artistic Director, Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata (Argentina)

We really hope to see the film by Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento come to fruition, and for this orphan film to be able to be finished and released. Raúl Ruiz's work has illuminated, from the auditoriums, our perception of the past and the present. He has accompanied us from a central place in the development of the arts and the stories that make up our most beloved cultural core for many decades now. It would be immensely unfair and painful for all of us who love cinema and art in general, not to be able to access a work by Raúl Ruiz only due to lack of funding. Even more so in the case of Socialist Realism, a film from the Ruiz-Sarmiento trilogy of recovered, reconstructed and completed films, after the masterpieces The Wandering Soap Opera and The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror. Money should occupy a very small place next to the enormous figure of Raúl Ruiz.

CLAUDIO XHINNO LEIVA

Filmmaker (Chile)

Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz actively participated in the political and social process of the Unidad Popular in the 1970s in Chile, although in his own way. Ruiz was skeptical of the optimism of the left-wing parties. For Ruiz, the basis of national thought was more in mischief, contradiction and revelry, than in social awareness and reason. In the middle of 1973 he directed the feature film Socialist Realism, where a right-wing advertising professional radicalizes himself to the left, and a left-wing worker radicalizes himself to the right. The film is a political and social satire, which boasts a rather chilling dark humor, perhaps the most extreme of Ruiz’s entire Chilean period until 1973.

In Ruiz's words: "It is fundamentally a political ‘feuilleton’, in which we have dealt with the seizure of power rather ironically. I worked with a group of workers who had taken over a factory and, since they were good actors, the result was a musical comedy, even despite having filmed live".

The title is a provocation, an ironic reference to the concept of "socialist realism" that defined the artistic trend of political propaganda imposed in the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin. Far from being a work of art indulgent toward the Unidad Popular process, Socialist Realism questions it critically.

The brutal Civilian Military Coup orchestrated by Pinochet in 1973 interrupted the production and plunged the film and the entire culture of a country into the mists of time. Ruiz passed away in 2011 leaving numerous unfinished projects. Many of them lost.

However, from 2016 onwards, actress and producer Chamila Rodríguez, along with Poetastros and filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento, Ruiz's widow and editor of most of his films, have carried out a tooth-and-nail effort, investing their own contributions and those of their families, achieving important international alliances and agreements to bring to film projectors’ light the posthumous work of one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. They undertook the task of recovering and posthumously releasing three of his unfinished projects, of which there was news regarding the lost materials: The Wandering Soap Opera (2017), which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival; The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror (2020), which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival; and Socialist Realism, a feature film of which Ruiz only managed to make a first cut, and the original material was lost for more than 45 years. Part of this material was found in the Duke University Library in the U.S., and another part at the Cinematek of Belgium in the course of 2017.

The cinephiles of the world are expectant. As critic Roger Koza wrote, any Ministry of Culture — with a capital C — of any country would find the resources to bring to light a work of such magnitude. Would it not? Is it necessary to give explanations?

Well, from 2018 to date, the State of Chile through its Ministry of Culture, Art and Heritage, yes, of HERITAGE, has refused on 4 different occasions to grant the resources to finish the post-production of the film and release it. How much are we talking about? $150,000 dollars. While the fortune of a country is squandered in luxurious acts of corruption and looting of capital or mechanisms of oppression are financed, helplessness and fear permeate the culture of a people. "Chile is cursed," said Ruiz. It is the fog, sometimes almost invincible. But it is the art of friendship and courage, as a beacon to drive away fear, — that which maintains all humans and makes us cling to each other — that gives us the key as a people. Heirs to the culture of a country and to universal culture, we will not let time, silence, or cultural obscurantism thicken the fog and erase the contemplation of a genius like Raúl Ruiz. Even less so with a work so necessary for the times we live in.

IAN CHRISTIE

London

Raul Ruiz was a new kind of filmmaker when he burst upon the world in the 1980s. Adept at moving between elaborate fictions and short commissions for television, he revealed an amazing range of genres, many of his own invention. But before he and Valeria Sarmiento reached Europe as refugees from Allende's coup in Chile, he had been a supporter of the Popular Unity government in the early 1970s. His films from this period have only survived in fragments, but one of the most tantalising is Socialist Realism, originally subtitled, with typical Ruizian irony, 'Considered as a Fine Art'. Originally salvaged from a foreign embassy in Santiago in 1981, the restoration of this intriguing work from a formative moment in Ruiz's early career is now possible.

Ruiz described it as starting from the idea of two stories that would never meet, comparing it to William Faulkner's novel Wild Palms, but with a lyrical episode connecting them. The length grew, and the poetic link disappeared, but the film - interrupted by the coup against Allende, has remained in scattered fragments. Now, under the guidance of Ruiz's co-director and widow, Valeria Sarmiento, its restoration is under way at the Chilean film archive. But this is only possible with external funding.

Raul Ruiz remains an inspiration to independent filmmakers around the world. Living and creating from one film to the next, working in different countries and languages, he created some of the most original and challenging films of the last half-century. Slowly, his lost work is being restored and brought to light - which should be a cause for celebration among all who value truly free and imaginative cinema.

IGNACIO AGÜERO

Filmmaker (Chile)

Ruiz, the most Chilean of all. At least the one who knows them (us) best, who has made being Chilean an aesthetic matter, a way of approaching human nature and the complexity of its existence, with grace, with style, with humor. Hence his great first films, the Chilean ones. Hence his great last films, when he returns, already having become a filmmaker the size of the Andes mountain range, quoting Pasolini: My country, whose sweetness is a weapon that does not forgive. A knower of his country and of Chileans, he would not be surprised if, already dead, the State and a jury were to refuse to finance his Socialist Realism. But all of us who do not run the State today and all of us who are not part of the jury, we want to see, we cry out to see this film, to get away, for a moment, from the smallness, and get to see the world from the height and beauty of his eyes.

JOAN AGUILAR, ANNA HOFFMANN, BIRGIT KOHLER, JAMES LATTIMER, CRISTINA NORD, JACQUELINE NSIAH

Members of the Berlinale Forum’s selection committee

There is no doubt that Raúl Ruiz was one of the most important, ingenious and highly regarded Latin America filmmakers. His body of work is so rich, fascinating and timeless that it deserves to be shown over and over again, be it in Santiago de Chile, in Paris or in Hong Kong.

It was a real sensation when fragments of his unfinished films were found after his passing in 2011: precious examples of his burgeoning filmmaking career that he shot in Chile in the sixties before he had to leave the country. Valeria Sarmiento, a celebrated filmmaker in her own right and Ruiz’s widow, managed to transform these fragments into two complete films, The Wandering Soap Opera (presented at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2017) and The Tango of The Widower and Its Distorting Mirror (2020). The latter had its world premiere roughly a year ago, as the opening film of the 50th Berlinale Forum, an independent section of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival.

And what an opening film it was! After the reels resurfaced at a cinema in Santiago de Chile, Valeria Sarmiento set to work on the footage. Deaf consultants helped her reconstruct the dialogue by reading the actors’ lips. The story centres on Mr. Iriarte, whose life is turned upside down by the death of his wife. She haunts him at night, her wigs scurry around the parquet floor, and eventually even the devil himself makes an appearance in this playful, mirrored arrangement. THE TANGO OF THE WIDOWER AND ITS DISTORTING MIRROR moves backwards and forwards in time as though yesterday were tomorrow and today 50 years ago: It was the ideal opening film to celebrate the Berlinale Forum’s anniversary year.

Given the importance of Raúl Ruiz’s work and the brilliance of the two films Valeria Sarmiento completed in a posthumous collaboration after her husband’s passing, the decision not to support the completion of the third film in this trilogy is baffling to say the least. Film lovers all over the world are longing to see EL REALISMO SOCIALISTA and dive even deeper into the universe of this most Chilean of artists. May their longing soon be fulfilled.