From North to South and South to North
Session 4. The Cinema of Marilú Mallet. A Poetics of Portrait
Marilú Mallet, Geografía personal (Personal Geography), 2016, film
Held on 31 May, 05 Jun 2026
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
Curatorship
Pablo Caldera
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid
Accessible activity
This activity has two spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility
Agenda
domingo 31 may 2026 a las 12:00
First Session
— With a presentation and talk by Pablo Caldera, the series’ curator, and film-maker Marilú Mallet
viernes 05 jun 2026 a las 20:00
Second Session
PROGRAMME
Marilú Mallet. Geografía personal (Personal Geography)
Canada, Chile, 2016, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Spanish, 95’
The Cinema of Marilú Mallet. A Poetics of Portrait
Activity within the program...
The Cinema of Marilú Mallet. A Poetics of Portrait
Museo Reina Sofía and Documenta Madrid come together to organise the first international retrospective on the work of Marilú Mallet (Santiago de Chile, 1944), one of the great pioneers of contemporary autofiction. Alongside Angelina Vázquez and Valeria Sarmiento, Mallet is part of a generation of women film-makers who made their first films during the Popular Unity Government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973), subsequently developing their practice in exile, from 1973 to 1989. Their films investigate, from a borderland hybridism between fiction and documentary, the power of film to explore complex, uprooted or in-flux identities. Moreover, Angelina Vázquez and Valeria Sarmiento, as well as Marilú Mallet herself, participate in the series.
The 1973 coup d’état not only ended part of Chile’s film heritage, but also curtailed the possibility of making, distributing and viewing films in Chile — university faculties closed as a regime of fear, control and censorship gripped the country. Until that point, Mallet, a trained architect, had made Amuhuelai-mi (1972), produced by Chile Films, in a portrait of Mapuche communities and their territorial claims across history. With the onset of the military dictatorship, she was exiled to Canada, where she built a filmography that reiterated the political force of the film portrait. In 1975 with the medium-length film Lentement she participated in the collective film Il n’y a pas d’oubli (There Is No Oblivion), and opposite the objectivist aspiration of documentary realism she made Journal inachevé (Unfinished Journal, 1982), one of the most extraordinary portraits of Chilean cinema in exile. Through a self split between two places — Chile and Canada — and multiple identities (mother and daughter, woman and artist), Mallet experimented, in diary form, with a whole poetics of uprootedness that asserts itself as open and procedural.
She is recognised for her pioneering work in the first person and its fictitious ramifications in documentary, and, with political rigour, she has also made films on communities that resist forced industrialisation. In the late 1970s she travelled to Nicaragua to film El Evangelio en Solentiname (The Gospel in Solentiname), a portrait of poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal and, in 1983, shot Andahuaylillas. Memorias de una niña de los Andes (Andahuaylillas. Memories of a Girl from the Andes) in Peru. After a decade-long hiatus, she returned to film-making with Double Portrait in 2000, an exploration into the relationship with her mother, the painter María Luisa Señoret, a figure that had already been the focus of her film Diario inacabado (Unfinished Diary). In 2015 she went back to Chile to film Geografía personal (Personal Geography), a kind of road movie that explores, from the undeniable tension of exile, the relationship between landscape, memory and identity.
The film-maker stresses how she has always sought to “push the techniques of fiction inside documentary”, a much-praised misalignment that echoes the exile’s condition. In her films we see a subject torn between body and space, the voice and camera travelling through corridors or landscapes, Chile and Canada, patriarchal power and female autonomy, the French and the Spanish languages. This ongoing tension translates into images with an untamed political force, moving beyond testimony and shaping thought around the notion of subject and portrait. Furthermore, the series features films by Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, Mallet’s contemporaries, who also built their filmographies from exile — all three major film-makers of displacement gather here for the first time.
Ver programa
A Poetics of the Subject
Past activity
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Dear Americas
Past activity
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
Exile and Alienation
Past activity
In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
From North to South and South to North
Past activity
In a kind of road movie, Marilú Mallet travels across her native Chile after forty years of exile. The journey is an exploration of the dynamism of national identity, leading the film-maker to return to questions previously explored in her filmography and to search for new forms of filming the encounter between body and landscape.
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