The Double Day of Valeria Sarmiento

Abstract

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.