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Diario inconcluso / Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary), dir. Marilú Mallet, Chile / Canada 1982
The third programme in the No Master Territories series brings together two films by Chilean filmmakers in exile in the 1980s.
No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image is dedicated to works of nonfiction that invent new languages for the representation of gendered experience. Concentrating on the period of the 1970s to 1990s, a time when women’s liberation movements took hold internationally, it responds to the contemporary imperative to recover the breadth of women’s contributions to film history in a global context.
Preceded by an introduction with Erika Balsom.
Programme
Diario inconcluso/Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary), dir. Marilú Mallet, Chile / Canada 1982, 50 min., 16mm (digital transfer), Spanish, French & English with Engllish subtitles
Marilú Mallet arrived in Quebec in 1973, fleeing her native Chile after the coup d’état against Salvador Allende led to Augusto Pinochet’s military junta. Diario inconcluso / Journal inachevé was made nearly a decade later. In the words of film scholar Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, the film ‘uses the intimate diary form to convey Mallet’s everyday life as an exiled woman filmmaker in Montreal, working through her past while navigating a new culture,’ thereby ‘bridging the individual and collective experiences of forced displacement.’ The film emerged from an unfinished epistolary project titles Les lettres (The Letters), which Mallet planned to undertake with her friend and fellow Chilean filmmaker in exile Valeria Sarmiento, who was at the time living in Paris.
Fragmentos de un diario inacabado (Fragments from an Unfinished Diary), dir. Angelina Vázquez, Chile / Finland 1983, 59 min., 16mm (digital transfer), Spanish with English subtitles
Angelina Vázquez, a Chilean filmmaker who had been active in the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR), went into exile following Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in 1973. Ten years later, she returned to the country semi-clandestinely to make a film about what had happened in the intervening decade. Forced to leave before she started shooting, Vázquez pursued her project with the help of collaborators, completing it from Finland. In the words of film scholar Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, ‘Fragmentos de un diario inacabado brings together elements of the epistolary and diary films, as well as the travelogue, to create a resilient portrait of Chilean society as it resists an oppressive dictatorial regime through different collective strategies, including folk music, popular theatre, soup kitchens, and growing mass demonstrations that coincided with the shooting of Vázquez’s film.’
Curated by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, No Master Territories originated as a gallery exhibition and film programme of over 100 works by 89 individuals and collectives, on view at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in summer 2022.
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