The Wandering Soap Opera

Director: Raúl Ruiz, Raúl Ruiz, Valeria Sarmiento

2017 / 80min / DCP

Six years after Ruiz’s death, his wife and principal collaborator, Sarmiento, a notable director in her own right, cut together this inspired satire of Chilean political life composed of 16mm material produced during a six-day acting workshop that the late director had conducted back in 1990. A freewheeling, surreal send-up that reflects the political and socio-economic realities of contemporary Chile in the funhouse mirror of the telenovela, or television soap opera. “Functions simultaneously as a critique of the self-serious idiocy of authority and a celebration of the anarchic power of imagination.”—The New York Times