Sara y Rosa Special Section: latin-american feminisms
From obscene tears to liberatory rage, we escape our prisons
Juliana Gusman

The special section presented by the Sara y Rosa platform at the 28th FestCurtasBH emerges from a curatorial act of disobedience. It is part of the first cycle of the Permanent Ibero-American Film Club, a partnership launched in 2026 between this feminist film criticism collective, the Instituto Cervantes de Belo Horizonte, and Cine Humberto Mauro, centered on the theme “The Fictional Borders of Home.” In our encounters, we select and discuss narrative feature films made by women, filmmakers who challenged the prevailing domestic order and ventured into pioneering territory, despite the inhospitability of the cinematic field to their audacity — figures such as Mexican filmmaker Matilde Landeta in the 1950s, Spanish filmmaker Cecilia Bartolomé in the 1960s, Argentine filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg in the 1970s, and Venezuelan filmmaker Fina Torres in the 1980s. If the festival’s invitation encourages us to turn our gaze towards other forms of trailblazing in short film — a format historically more receptive to our rebellions — we also allow ourselves to glimpse the transgressive — and fabulatory — possibilities of documentary. We steal away our own criteria in order to expand the horizon of feminine deviations.

It is true that In the mornings (Por la mañana, 1980), by Colombian filmmaker Patricia Restrepo — one of the few and notable women to be part of the Cali Group, which she left to join Cine Mujer (1978–1990) in Bogotá, eventually making her way into directing — keeps us, at least initially, faithful to the game of fictionality. In a triptych recitation of Jacques Prévert’s poem Déjeuner du matin (1946), we observe the performative imprisonment of a wife suffocated by her husband’s alienation and by the unyielding edges of a close-up. In this lyrical and frontal staging of her bitterness, we are confronted, without evasions, with the denunciation of the subjective immobility imposed upon her. The only evasive gesture left to her is to cry in an off-screen space no less oppressive.

Meanwhile, Valeria Sarmiento’s The housewife (La dueña de casa, 1975) — made with cans of unexposed film stock she received from her partner, Raúl Ruiz, as payment for her work editing his films, and during the filmmaker’s exile in France following the coup d’état that extinguished the flame of Chile’s Nuevo Cinema — reveals other forms of confinement. The oblique angles allude not only to a spatial circumscription that guides the camera’s slow and discreet movements, but also to the critical, empathetic, and cognitive limits of a middle class that refrains from confronting the streets. For affluent women, popular revolt is as repugnant as the wet grease left at the bottom of the sink: they evade such disgusts through the predatory comfort of alienation and the outsourcing (racialized, evidently) of their own filth.

The contradictions of this same caste unsettled the Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg, who sixty years ago left us The interview (A entrevista, 1966), a landmark in the emergence of women’s authorship within Brazilian modern cinema. The fictional dimension is maintained here through the mise-en-scène — her sister-in-law at the time, Glória Solberg, plays a young bride preparing for her own wedding — while, on the soundtrack, we hear dissonant testimonies from young women indebted to and in doubt about the ideology of marriage. Both Sarmiento and Solberg hold their characters accountable for the democratic downfall — The housewife critically recovers a divine salute by Madame Pinochet following the fall of the Popular Unity government, while The interview revisits, with the same acerbity, archival footage of the reactionary March of the Family with God for Freedom, superimposing it onto the synthesized image of Glória’s persona. Solberg, however, insists on the openings of a more porous spatiality — her false bride, at least, leaves the house — and of a mentality that, if not self-aware, is somewhat more ambiguous.

There are no consensuses among the figures in My contribution (Mi aporte, 1969), by Sara Gómez, a Cuban pioneer whose name and spirit we claim, with humility and honor, in our project. That said, these frictions do not arise from normative complacency (never a gentle one) — from a vile and docile good-naturedness — but from the disorder of a post-revolutionary society that still needed to heal the fresh sutures of a capitalist authoritarianism in raw flesh. Gómez refrains from deciphering the subject that sustains the myth of womanhood — white, heterocentric, servile — in order to immerse herself in the destabilizing plurality of a category she approaches — and which, upon setting foot on the factory floor for the first time at the dawn of socialism on the island, recognizes itself — as class. In what is the most purely documentary film in the program (with unmistakable echoes of Rouch and Morin), we stretch our utopian imagination: with the radicality of dialectical divergences among autonomous women, it is impossible to imprison ourselves in fixed positions. They assert their bodies, speak out, and summon us to an unrestrained anger for our freedom.

1. Founded by Luis Ospina, Andrés Caicedo, and Carlos Mayolo in the 1970s, the group not only produced films but also published the magazine Ojo al cine and organized film club gatherings, initiatives that played an important role in the cultural formation of a generation.

Bibliography

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