FREE MUSIC SCHOOL × LOOP CITY SCREEN 2026
¿QUIÉN ES ROSARIO PI?
A film by Sylvia Zade-Routier
Hosted by Kat Stadler with Chantal Yzermans
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15 · 4 PM
Avinguda del Carrilet, 183
L’Hospitalet de Llobregat
Runtime: 51 minutes
Language: [LANGUAGE AND SUBTITLE INFORMATION TO BE CONFIRMED]
Free admission
The screening will begin promptly at 4 PM. Please arrive early.
THE SCREENING
Join us for a free Sunday-afternoon screening devoted to Rosario Pi: filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, entrepreneur and one of the great overlooked pioneers of Spanish cinema.
ROSARIO PI: A CINEMA PIONEER
Born in Barcelona in 1899, Pi founded and presided over the production company Star Film at a time when women were rarely permitted to lead in the film industry. She wrote, produced and directed, creating El gato montés and Molinos de viento and becoming one of the earliest women to direct sound cinema in Spain. Her work carried an unusually forceful vision of female independence—both on screen and in the life she constructed for herself.
In ¿Quién es Rosario Pi? (1988), French filmmaker Sylvia Zade-Routier returns to Pi’s life and work, restoring a woman nearly erased from film history. Through archival footage, film excerpts and testimony, the documentary traces Pi’s extraordinary career against the turbulent background of the Spanish Civil War.
Commissioned by Madrid’s Instituto de la Mujer and the Spanish Ministry of Social Affairs, it remains the first—and, to date, only—audiovisual documentary devoted entirely to Rosario Pi.
SYLVIA ZADE-ROUTIER
Born in Paris in 1945, Sylvia Zade-Routier studied literature in Paris and Cambridge before continuing her education in film and communication in Madrid and Rome. In 1970, she became the first French woman director to work for Spanish National Television. Over more than four decades, she created an independent body of fiction, documentary filmmaking and screenwriting across Spain, France, Britain and the United States.
At the heart of Zade-Routier’s work is a sustained exploration of female subjectivity: women negotiating identity, exile, desire, social expectation and the search for freedom. Her films have appeared at international festivals including Cannes and Créteil and have received distinctions from France’s CNC and the Spanish Ministry of Culture.
Her wider filmography includes portraits of artists and cultural figures, experimental 35mm films, documentaries and feature-film screenplays centered on women who refuse the paths prescribed for them.
A LIVING ARCHIVE
The screening also carries a tender line of transmission: one woman filmmaker looking back at another, and an artistic life now being gathered and brought forward by another.
Sylvia Zade-Routier’s partner, Belgian choreographer and researcher Chantal Yzermans, is undertaking the patient work of bringing Sylvia’s archive together—locating and organizing films, screenplays, photographs and documents; helping preserve work created across several countries and more than four decades; and finding new ways for it to be seen, studied and shared.
This screening forms part of that living archival project. It brings Sylvia’s work into public view again while opening new conversations around women’s authorship, artistic partnership, intimate memory and the fragile histories that survive because someone chooses to care for them.
Come spend the afternoon with us—for cinema, conversation and the pleasure of keeping women’s histories alive.
EXPLORE SYLVIA’S WORK
We warmly encourage you to continue exploring Sylvia’s remarkable life and work through her website, where you can discover her films, screenplays, career, biography and evolving archival project:
https://sylvia-zade-routier.squarespace.com
Chantal also welcomes conversations with archivists, curators, researchers and people working across museums, cinematheques, galleries, festivals, universities and independent cultural spaces.
If Sylvia’s work resonates with your programme or research, please get in touch to explore possible screenings, exhibitions, archival collaborations and other ways of bringing this remarkable body of work into new contexts and conversations.
QUESTIONS & COLLABORATIONS
Chantal Yzermans
+33 6 49 75 04 63
radicallow@mac.com
