Fifty Years in the Making
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This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup led by Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, who seized power from President Salvador Allende, deposed the Popular Unity government, and launched a murderous campaign against the leftist political opposition that lasted for seventeen years. Shortly after the coup, director Raúl Ruiz and his wife and close collaborator, filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento, abandoned their projects and left Chile for France.
One of those projects was Socialist Realism, a riotous blend of documentary and fiction depicting clashes within the Popular Unity alliance. In the summer of 2021, we reported that Sarmiento and the Chilean production company Poetastros, founded by filmmakers Chamila Rodríguez and Galut Alarcón, having completed restorations of Ruiz’s The Wandering Soap Opera (1990/2017) and The Tango of the Widower (1967/2020), were calling on the community of cinephiles to help them reconstruct and complete Socialist Realism. Chile’s Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage had rejected four applications for grants, but the community came through. Socialist Realism is set to premiere this year, and today, we present the new trailer.
“Games were what interested us,” Ruiz told Benoît Peeters in a 1986 conversation about Socialist Realism. “So we have two characters: one of them lives in a petite bourgeoise milieu associated with the bureaucratic structures of Popular Unity; the other is a sort of proletarian sliding towards the lumpenproletariat. For one moment these characters meet each other and connect.”
