"The Wandering Soap Opera" -
"La telenovela errante"
Raúl Ruiz, Valeria Sarmiento
In 1990, Ruiz conducted six days of acting workshops and filming in his native Chile, yielding a small wealth of 16mm footage that was never edited together until Valeria Sarmiento, Ruiz’s wife and chief collaborator, returned to it nearly six years after Ruiz’s death in 2011. The result is a wildly inventive, episodic work of political satire born of Ruiz and Sarmiento’s vision of “Chilean reality” as a grand pastiche of soap-opera tropes—in other words, that the best way to understand the political and economic realities Chileans face is to view their situation through the sublime and ridiculous prism of the telenovela. North American Premiere.--
Film at Lincoln Center,
February 18, 2018
Honestly, the strange beauty and humor of "The Wandering Soap Opera" defies rational explanation: hints of meaning are about as close as you're going to come to "getting" this particular film. But what a thrill to come that close, especially when there's so much here to laugh at and wonder about. Raul Ruiz is dead; long may he live.--
Roger Ebert,
May 17, 2019
The late Chilean master's 1990 unfinished film was completed by his widow Valeria Sarmiento and premiered in Locarno in 2017. The film made its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in 2017 and had its U.S. premiere as part of Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of Ruiz’s work last year. It will open at Anthology Film Archives in New York City on May 17 before expanding to theaters across the country.--
The Hollywood Reporter,
3/15/2019
