Documenting the Feminine: Women Directors at the IV INSTAR Film Festival
By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - November 30, 2023
RIALTA
The IV INSTAR Film Festival will take place from December 4 to 10 with a film curatorship in which, although it is possible to talk about interconnected themes and aesthetics in a general sense, it is important to highlight the great mosaic of female characters created and recreated by the directors invited to the competition.
Women's narratives in cinema have been accused of defending the apparently intimate and making films "of few characters”, but it is precisely in these intimate searches where politics and the transformation of patriarchy have found the fiercest criticism. Although we are still discussing the figure of the director as the main axis within filmmaking, just a glance at the program will reveal women in professions that feminist film theory has long pointed out as key to a more equitable representation of the world through audiovisuals.
Thus, names like Daniela Muñoz Barroso, Carla Valdés León, or Nicaraguan Gloria Carrión Fonseca, who move between producing and directing, and Gretel Marín Palacio, who has moved from editing to directing, come to this edition. Their diverse poetics and different readings explore female characters that serve as a beacon for the construction of memory, of the nation, because, in the end, the homeland has always been more of a motherland than the heteropatriarchy has let on.
Mafifa, the Valdés-Serrano family, K., and Afíbola Sífunola are fragments of that motherland, which builds from memory and continues in a present from which it hopes to modify the future. This is how 'Mafifa' (2021), 'The Pure Ones' (2021), 'Leaves of K.' (2022) and 'Roads of Lava' (2023) can be appreciated respectively. Each director has built a personal relationship with the characters in their films and, although for taxonomic purposes we speak of documentary, each of the filmmakers has blurred the limits of this film genre, which, fortunately for free and daring spectators, is expanding more and more every day thanks to the many contaminations of what we call fiction.
In these four films, words build memory. Daniela Muñoz Barroso, from her sincerity as a woman and filmmaker, steps in front of the camera as a character in search of Mafifa's voice. It has always been said that listening is not exactly like hearing. The art of listening requires concentration and the ability to empathize with others. Thus, the filmmaker listens in every moment of her documentary feature, not only to what her characters have to say but also to the resonances of the bond she establishes with them through such listening. Reconstruction and recreation are mixed in ‘Mafifa’. The filmmaker selects detailed shots, and through them, the viewers are compelled to build their own versions of a woman with her, but also of a city, of a cultural rite, of a history.
Muñoz Barroso has been denied the pleasure of physically meeting his female character; Marín Palacio has not, and consequently, Afíbola becomes part of the creative team of 'Roads of Lava'. The representation of Afro-descendant women in Cuban cinema through a gaze in which they feel comfortable and can express themselves has not always been achieved in Cuban cinema. The question of representation versus representativeness of Cuban Afro-descendants gravitates over the island's audiovisual landscape.
Family and the different ways of building it are also a theme in these films. In that sense, the element "house" - although not new in cinema to illustrate or symbolize life, family, and home - is presented in 'Roads of Lava' as a symbol that runs parallel to the relationship built between mother and son, but also to what is desired for the son so that he can live in a country called Cuba.
The intimate physical space of a house also provides the context that brings together the characters in 'The Pure Ones'. Although pragmatically family has been constructed in a consanguineous way, both Carla Valdés and Gretel Marín expand that structure, for it is only through its resignification that memories can be reconstructed and contexts understood.
The material world is full of privileges, and the spirituality that emerges from this empty house, to be built, to be filled with memories, which Afíbola and her son Olorum will inhabit, is a possibility to which all people should have the right, as well as to be able to express themselves at their own pace, according to their identities, not only of gender but also cultural and historical.
A group of young people who are away from their parents and live together in a different country, in different houses, configure their familiarity, and through this, it is possible to unravel the analytical ideas and feelings of a past that feels doubly preterit, because "the pure ones" who appear in front of Valdés León's lens are not always able to explain with words what they lived through. And it is within the space in which the reunion takes place, and thanks to the "sharing of bread", that the philosophers succeed in grounding what they have lived and thus build a collective memory.
'The pure ones’, a colloquial expression of Cuban speech used to refer to parents or, in a more open sense, to people who are more or less over sixty years old, becomes a polysemic expression in the film. This group of people is returning in their memories to a "pure" stage, to a youth where they were hopeful in their personal projects, but also in a larger, collective project that even pretended to go beyond the country's meaning.
The stories told by these women directors come from the womb, and this has always been associated with the sentimental, or with childbirth, not only as a biological act but also as an act of creating or expelling from oneself. There are stories that the protagonists can tell while looking at the camera, and thus have the chance to purge them through their own audiovisual representation; in other cases, the protagonists cannot even show themselves, as in 'Leaves of K.', by Gloria Carrión Fonseca.
Animation as a language is not only an "aesthetic" decision in this film: its protagonists still risk reprisals for telling and denouncing their experiences under the Nicaraguan regime of Daniel Ortega. Likewise, when we talk about conflicts involving physical and psychological violence against women and girls, there is a risk that the audiovisual exposure may end up re-victimizing them. Hence, the decision to animate and/or give life to K. became the necessary poetry to narrate -with testimony as the raw material- these harsh and violent events that continue to go unpunished.
The INSTAR Film Festival will also screen other feminine representations, such as 'Women Dreaming A Nation' (2023), a documentary in competition directed by Cuban Fernando Fraguela Fosado. It is a film born from the urgency to denounce the political situation in Cuba. It is also essential to mention the special presentations of films by Cuban Miñuca Villaverde. Her work, her way of understanding cinema, is a living example that the "intimate" stories of women -according to the label many have proclaimed- are not at odds with a search and expansion of cinematographic language.
The connections established by the films of Carla Valdés León, Daniela Muñoz Barroso, Gretel Marín Palacio, and Gloria Carrión Fonseca start from the generic specificities of documentary and extend to the margins of the historical narrative in search of other women whose voices and memories are not only rescued as protagonists of these audiovisual representations but also from the sororal relationship that ideally imagines a good part of the feminist movement.
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