Though sometimes rightly hailed as one of Latin America’s most important women directors, Valeria Sarmiento is more frequently referred to as the wife (now widow) and closest collaborator of Raúl Ruiz. Since Ruiz’s death in 2011, she has been completing his unfinished films. At the same time, she continues directing her own projects. This essay unpacks her unique creative partnership—working as an editor for her husband while simultaneously striving to direct her own work—as a “double day,” a concept that serves to interrogate the multiple (often unrecognized) tasks demanded of female filmmakers in relation to modes of production developed outside the boundaries of the nation-state, at the interstices of European and Latin American film and television industries. The article examines the interconnections between the gendered division of labor in filmmaking and the precarious mobilities that result from exile.
The Double Day of Valeria Sarmiento: Exile, Precariousness, and Cinema’s Gendered Division of Labor
Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto is an assistant professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the author of (Un)veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary (Legenda, 2019) and the coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (Metales Pesados, 2016). Her work has appeared in collections such as Doing Women’s Film History (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and the journals Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Rethinking History. Ramírez-Soto is one of the coordinators of the Latin American Women’s Audiovisual Research Network (RAMA). She holds a PhD in film and television studies from the University of Warwick.
Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto; The Double Day of Valeria Sarmiento: Exile, Precariousness, and Cinema’s Gendered Division of Labor. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2021; 7 (3): 154–177. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.154
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University of California Press