"I was criticized for making a film about strip clubs when I was supposed to be making documentaries about miners."

BarcelonaTo the extensive cycle that the Filmoteca of Catalonia dedicates starting this Thursday to the Chilean director Valeria Sarmiento (Valparaiso, Chile, 1948) and her sentimental and creative partner, Raoul Ruiz, who died in 2011, a film could be added in which Sarmiento participated as a7 Ocaña. Intermittent Portrait, Ventura Pons's debut film. "It was a very beautiful film, and Ocaña was a wonderful character," he says with a sweet smile, as if unlocking a distant memory, celebrating the film's relevance in the history of LGBT cinema. "I made it because Ventura was a friend of the Chilean photographer Luis Poirot, who told him about me," he says.

Ocaña It is, in any case, a footnote to the more than thirty films she has directed – 150 if we add her collaborations with Raoul Ruiz – by a committed author, a pioneer of feminist documentary in Latin America and a lover of popular genres. In fact, her first feature-length fiction film, My wedding with you (1984), adapted a novel by Corín Tellado. How does a director forged in the militant cinema of Allende's Popular Unity government end up directing a story by the queen of romantic literature? "Because Corín Tellado was the most widely read writer in Latin America, and I was preparing a documentary on romance novels," she summarizes. In the film, a girl is given away by her father to a childless couple and, twenty years later, marries her adoptive father. "They're always stories of old men with young girls," notes Sarmiento, who approaches this demented plot from a playful and reflective perspective. "There are moments when you enter and let yourself be carried away by the melodrama, but then you take a step back and tell yourself this can't be, it's too ridiculous," she reflects.

Combative Feminism

Sarmiento's first film is at the antipodes: A dream like colors, a 1972 short about women who worked making striptease in Chile's Allende clubs. "Young people went to the clubs a lot striptease And I wanted to find out who those women really were," she explains. "But I was criticized a lot, because at the time I was making documentaries about miners. I was already a feminist; I had read Simone de Beauvoir, and the subject concerned me. But the government always said: 'Comrades, we make revolutions first, then we'll worry about you.'" Years later, already in exile, she filmed an impressive documentary about machismo in Costa Rica: Man when he is man"They always tell you that you have to make films about women, but I wanted to see the other point of view, that of the men, and see how they were educated," she notes. "I wanted to do it in Mexico, but they didn't give me the visa and I ended up in Costa Rica. But it went very well for me, because there weren't many films there and people didn't have much cinema and people didn't have it."

In 2013, Sarmiento took over as director of the project her husband was preparing when he died, the Portuguese historical drama Wellington Lines"The producer suggested John Malkovich, who was the lead, but he said, 'If Valeria's in it, why don't you ask her?' And so he did." The cast of that film is historic: Isabelle Huppert, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli... "They wanted to be there as a tribute to Raoul," he says. "In fact, we had to add a scene for them." In recent years, Sarmiento has completed three films that her husband had left unfinished: The Widower's Tango, The wandering soap opera and Socialist realism"Raoul loved filming, but he didn't like finishing films that much," says the director with a smile, highlighting the difficulty of restoringThe Widower's Tango: "The sound was gone, so we had to hire two deaf people to lip-read and record the dialogue."