The Wandering Soap Opera

La Telenovela Errante
Raúl Ruiz, Valeria Sarmiento

Shot in 1990 but unfinished until nearly six years after Ruiz’s death, The Wandering Soap Opera is a wildly inventive, episodic satire born of Ruiz and his wife and collaborator Sarmiento’s attempt to view Chilean political life through the sublime and ridiculous prism of the telenovela.

DIRECTOR
Raúl Ruiz, Valeria Sarmiento
YEAR
1990/2017
COUNTRY
Chile
RUNTIME
80 minutes
LANGUAGE
Spanish with English subtitles
ORIGINAL TITLE
La Telenovela Errante

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 

Additional support for this film is provided by Poetastros and Duke University.

The Wandering Soap Opera
The Wandering Soap Opera

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