Exile and Alienation
Session 3. The Cinema of Marilú Mallet. A Poetics of Portrait
Valeria Sarmiento, Huellas (Fingerprints), 2023, film
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.
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
sábado 30 may 2026 a las 18:00
First Session
— With a presentation and talk by film-makers Marilú Mallet, Angelina Vázquez and Valeria Sarmiento, moderated by Pablo Caldera, the series’ curator, and Chema González, head of Film and New Media at the Museo Reina Sofía
sábado 06 jun 2026 a las 18:00
Second Session
PROGRAMME
Angelina Vázquez. Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland)
Finland, 1975, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Spanish and Finnish with Spanish subtitles, 28’
Marilú Mallet. Lentement
Canada, 1975, DCP, colour, sound, original version in French with Spanish subtitles, 36’
Valeria Sarmiento. Huellas (Fingerprints)
Chile, 2023, DCP, colour, sound, original version in Spanish and French with Spanish subtitles, 63’
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
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
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
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
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
Saturday 30 May and 6 Jun, 2026 - 18:00 H
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
Sunday 31 May and Friday 5 June, 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.
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
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.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
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.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.