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.  

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.’