Huellas

In the 1970s, Valeria Sarmiento was living in exile in Paris and experienced a very difficult feeling: she felt guilty of having survived while so many Chileans were suffering under Pinochet. While in LA DUEÑA DE CASA (1975) she brought the sounds of the military coup to a quiet European apartment, the same movement is reversed in HUELLAS: a devastating cut takes us from a woman rummaging through boxes on the streets of Belleville to hands removing the newspapers that cover a dead body in Chile. Sarmiento has to return to her country, in search of the remnants of that collective experience. She knows that cinema is an art of small gestures and mundane objects, and that’s why she pays so much attention to the blindfolds and blankets of the prisoners, or an architect’s drawing that references a concentration camp. Despite all the powerful attempts to erase them, traces—like cinema—are material in motion and can migrate from one place to another, even across generations (as the film shows, trauma can be inherited through epigenetics). HUELLAS is a deep dive into these moving materialities, from space to space, from time to time, from body to body. (Victor Guimarães)

In the presence of Valeria Sarmiento and Daniela Salazar (Production).

Valeria Sarmiento: UN SUEÑO COMO DE COLORES (1974, K), LA DUEÑA DE LA CASA (1975, K), LA NOSTALGIA (1979, K), NOTRE MARIAGE (1979), GENS DE NULLE PART, GENS DE TOUTES PARTS (1980), EL HOMBRE CUANDO ES HOMBRE (1982), AMELIA LOPES O’NEILL (1990), ELLE (1995), L’INCONNU DE STRASBOURG (1998), ROSA LA CHINA (2002), SECRETOS (2008), LINHAS DE WELLINGTON (2002), LA TELENOVELA ERRANTE (2017, KO-REGIE), O CADERNO NEGRO (2018), EL TANGO DEL VIUDO Y SU ESPEJO DEFORMANTE (2020, KO-REGIE), HUELLAS (2023), EL REALISMO SOCIALISTA (2023, KO-REGIE)