Raul Ruiz’s Rescued ‘Socialist Realism’ World Premieres in San Sebastian 50 Years After He Shelved It
variety.comAnna Marie de la Fuente A sardonic view of Popular Unity, the left-wing alliance once led by the assassinated Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende, Raul Ruiz’s docu-fiction hybrid, “Socialist Realism,” world premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival on Sept 23, 50 years after the prolific filmmaker was forced to abandon it.
It finally unspools after his widow, filmmaker-editor Valeria Sarmiento, with the backing of actress-helmer Chamila Rodríguez’s Poetastros production company, rescued and reconstructed the film.
Both Sarmiento and Rodríguez are in San Sebastian to present the pic. Ruiz, who died in 2011, was forced to flee the brutal 1973 coup d’état in his country and was never able to finish editing the hybrid feature.
What some pundits hailed as one of the filmmaker’s “most ambitious and political works” is made up of a series of short stories where two contrasting worlds collide, that of the workers and the bourgeois intellectual supporters of the Popular Unity coalition.
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