Cinema of Others. The View of Women Filmmakers from the Southern Territories
Film screenings and discussion with Anaís Córdova-Páez and Krystyna Jędrzejewska-Szmek
During the programme, we will learn about shamanic films, the perspective of people in transition, and community cinema. The artists whose films will be screened represent the countries of the South: Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Spain, and Colombia. They work with the topics of ecology, feminism, and anti-capitalism, employing various aesthetics, languages, and methods. They give voice to women and tell their stories, placing them in the context of myths and the cyclical understanding of the order of nature. Coyolxauhqui, for example, juxtaposes contemporary stories of femicide in rural Mexico with the myth of the Aztec moon goddess whose body was dismembered by her brother. The film is a visual poem about violence against women, rooted in the landscape, waiting to be awakened. In turn, Juanita Onzaga, in the short film Tomorow Is a Water Palace, clashes the concepts of spirituality and oppression, man versus nature. She calls her experiment “ancestral futurism” – a place where time and memory are bent. Another sensual film is Wüfko: a woman tells us about this sacred place in the Chilean Challupen forest, known as the “eye of water.” Except that this story is both reality and dream. The selection thus creates a space for imagining other futures: female, affective, ritual, communal, and other relationships between man and nature.
Day 1 Dream Narratives features five experimental short films involving rituality, speculation and the non-human centre.
Coyolxauhqui (Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, 2017). A searing evocation of femicide in rural Mexico. It recasts the dismemberment of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun, human sacrifice and war. It is a visual poem about the cyclical nature of traditional myths and rituals.
WÜFKO (Neyen Pailamilla, 2019). Drifting through the native forest we find the Wüfko, an eye of water, a spring of great purity and also the name of a sacred site in the forest of Challupen. A Mapuche woman tells us the dream she had about this place, revealing a kimün (knowledge) linked to her own body sensitivity.
Porcos Raivosos (Isabel Penoni e Leonardo Sette, 2012). This film is the outcome of what started as anthropological research into traditional ritual performances in the Cuicuro community and later transformed into a long-term relationship to work on a theatre-play cocreated with the community itself. Together, they explore the women’s most important myth, that of the Jamurikumalu – the myth of The Hyperwomen.
Corpusculo (Laura Ibanez Lopez, 2022). A "corpúsculo" is a really small part of our skin that allows us to feel a soft touch. Corpúsculos form the entrance to a cosmos where the inside and the outside of the body collide, mix and fuse. Corpúsculos is an experiment, a homage and a learning.
Tomorrow is a water palace (Juanita Onzaga, 2022). A lucid dream, an inner space sci-fi about Sybille, the last person alive on a planet with no water left. She roams through arid lands, traveling through strange visions. Entities with more memory than humans communicate with her. How can the spirit of the waters be persuaded to come back to earth?
Day 2 Extractivism features one experimental, contemporary short movie trilogy and a restored full film from 1988 by an iconic documentary filmmaker from Colombia – Marta Rodriguez.
Petroporn and Liporn (Isabel Torres, Ana Edwards, Lucía Egaña (CENEx), 2017). A part of the trilogy called Diaries of porn and extractivism which functions as a wild notebook, a series of mixed poetic and heretical visual essays of affections found at the crossroads of a territory and its representation. Using intuitive methodologies, CENEx discards official historicity through narratives that emphasise the tireless and insensitive suckings and penetrations of the pornographic narrative of the neoliberal extraction of oil and lithium.
Amor, mujeres y flores (Marta Rodríguez y Jorge Silva, 1988). Filmed over the course of five years, this two-part documentary by Colombian duo Marta Rodriguéz and Jorge Silva exposes the harmful working environment of flower cultivation labourers in the Bogotá savannah. The film paints a picture of the floriculture industry in Colombia, the demand for the country’s carnations in first-world markets, and the numerous labour and human rights violations by foreign companies in Colombia looking to supply that demand. Marta Rodriguez is a Latin American pioneer of documentary filmmaking.
