Soledad Saieh, who served as director of SANFIC, the Santiago International Film Festival, and was the co-founder of the private foundation CorpArtes, producer of the Chilean film festival, died of a heart attack at the age of 45, it was announced today.
Daughter of one of Chile's most prominent businessman, Saieh studied Commercial Engineering at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and earned an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002, she co-founded CorpArtes, a private non-for-profit foundation dedicated to promote the arts and improve the access to it through transformative cultural experiences.
The foundation, which manages initiatives in the fields of literature, visual arts, theater, music, and film, became the leading financial sponsor of SANFIC, and Saieh served as director of the festival for three editions between 2006 and 2008.
Saieh and CorpArtes helped financing Pablo Larraín's 2006 debut feature film Fuga starring Benjamín Vicuña and Gastón Pauls. More recently, she produced Jorge Olguín's Gritos del bosque / Whispers of the Forest (2015) and Daniela Goggi's El hilo rojo / The Red Thread (2016) through her production companies FunkyFilms and Demente.
Through her production company she was currently working on the biopic Mistral about the Nobel Prize-winner writer starring Paulina García, and on a television series based on Francisco Ortega's novel Logia, to be co-directed by Alejandro Fernández Almendras (To Kill a Man) and Óscar Godoy.
