A leading Chilean filmmaker, her career began in her native country in the 1970s with the documentary ‘Un sueño como de colores’ (1972), which focused on a group of women who worked as striptease dancers in Santiago. Since then, she has built a body of work that is free-spirited and defies easy categorisation, moving between documentary, melodrama, and other popular forms of cinema to challenge the roles imposed on women—always from a perspective marked by humour, irony, and a lack of solemnity.

Following the 1973 coup d’état, she moved to France, where she continued her career as a director and editor. Her first featu- re-length fiction film, ‘Notre mariage’ (1984), won the Donostia Grand Prize for New Filmmakers at the San Sebastian Film Festival. This film was followed by works such as ‘Amelia Lópes O’Neill’ (1991), nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlinale; ‘Elle’ (1995), selected for the competition at San Sebastian; ‘Lines of Wellington’ (2012), nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice; ‘La telenovela errante’ (2017), co-directed with Raúl Ruiz and awarded a special mention at the Mar del Plata Film Festival; and ‘El cuaderno negro’ (2018), nominated for the Golden Shell at San Sebastian. Last July, Karlovy Vary hosted the world premiere of ‘Detrás de la lluvia’ (2026), the film that provides a fitting culmination to her career and forms part of the Official Selection at Seminci, out of competition.

Film editing has been another discipline where she has excelled. In this regard, she worked on dozens of films and maintained a crea- tive collaboration for decades with Raúl Ruiz, her husband and one of the great auteurs of world cinema, with whom she worked on more than 80 films. Following his death in 2011, she has played a decisive role in preserving his legacy and is currently working alongside the production company Poetastros on the recovery, repatriation, restoration, post-production and completion of Raúl Ruiz’s film ‘La colonia penal’. In 2019, she was awarded an hono- rary doctorate by the University of Valparaíso, and in 2022 she received the Medal of Honour from the French Senate. Her work has also featured in international retrospectives at institutions such as the Cinémathèque Française, which have highlighted the originality and enduring relevance of her filmography.