Valeria Sarmiento

She is the widow of Chilean film director Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011) with whom she collaborated for decades as regular editor and co-writer.

Valeria Sarmiento (born 29 October 1948) is a film editor, director and screenwriter best known for her work in France, Portugal and her native Chile.

She has worked both in film and television, directing 20 feature films, documentaries and television series'.

She rarely saw French films due to censorship but, thanks to what she refers to as a "moment of magic", was able to watch Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) at the age of twelve.

She went on to study film and philosophy at the University of Valparaíso and married filmmaker Raúl Ruiz in 1969.

Sarmiento made her directorial debut with the documentary Un sueño como de colores (1972) about a group of Chilean women dedicated to striptease.

Her later work as a director, usually in melodrama, romantic drama and costume drama, has also often featured strong female characters who face machismo and sexism.

In 1974, the couple were forced to move to Paris due to the 1973 Chilean coup d'état of Augusto Pinochet.

Her debut feature Notre mariage (1984) was a Grand Prix winner for Best New Director at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, her 1991 film Amelia Lópes O'Neill was entered into the 41st Berlin International Film Festival and her Napoleonic war epic Lines of Wellington competed for the Golden Lion at the 69th Venice International Film Festival.

She has also edited films for Luc Moullet, Robert Kramer and Ventura Pons and is a Guggenheim Fellow (1988).

Sarmiento was born in the Chilean municipality of Valparaíso and was first exposed to film at the age of five, becoming familiar with the work of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and others.

A symposium on Sarmiento's feminism was held at Stanford University in May 2008 and the Cinémathèque Française ran a Sarmiento retrospective in October 2018.