Photographs and videos captured with mobile phones make up director Tana Gilbert’s first feature film, which won an award a few days ago at the Venice Film Festival. The film is her attempt to recover the collective memory of women deprived of their liberty and separated from their children, while developing links between them. “A subject that I find interesting to address through the film is the way in which generations and generations of people who commit crimes are constructed. Reintegration is actually a ghost,” says the filmmaker in dialogue with Culto.
The documentary poster Maldears explains the conditions in which it was created: “This film was made with images and testimonies of women while they were serving their sentences. “.
These images – photographs and videos recorded with cell phones inside the prison – remained in Tana Gilbert’s mind for seven years. The national director wanted to investigate the experience of mothers deprived of liberty, a concept which has been preserved despite the changes inherent in non-fiction cinema.
“The heart of the film has remained since the beginning of the investigation: how to bear prison with affection and what happens once women are separated from their children when they reach the age of two,” he explains to Worship .
Released – and premiered – in the version of the Venetian Festival that ended, the 74-minute film released a particular case, a woman who generates wines with other stories and which at the same time did not already start a diary with his son.
Gilbert decided to respect the original format of the discs, so the feature film has a vertical format. A choice which also reinforces the fact that he wanted to “symbolically represent their only possibility of being able to look outwards, because in prison the windows are vertical “.
They first met Karina Sánchez, the documentary’s narrator, during a prison law workshop held at San Joaquín Prison.
His story – he served a sentence of more than six years – constitutes a central part of the film, but there are also other testimonies which nourish the main axis. Telling their stories involved an in-depth process in which they built trust.
“Some were more reluctant. But ultimately the support network is so tenuous that many who may have disappeared for a while always come back. Somehow, They thought it was a safe space where they could count on us. . But it develops over the years.
Working alongside these women meant entrusting them with your videos and photographs. Equipment that could always be eliminated or confiscated, because cell phones are not allowed in prison.
“We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that cell phones are very common in prison. The majority of people deprived of their liberty in Chile have them, so the possibility of losing them means not being able to access the material with their children. The film reveals that the collective memory of this much abandoned community is always at risk of being eliminated or lost, and That’s why we thought this material was a treasure. , that it had to be preserved and kept alive. And that’s also why it’s so important that it’s not us who recorded, but them.”
Maldears raises a series of reflections on what it means to be a woman and a mother in prison, but also expands on her notes on what happens once the sentence is served.
“A subject that I find interesting to reflect on through the film is the way in which generations and generations of people who commit crimes are constructed,” explains Gilbert, for whom “reintegration is actually a phantom . There is no reintegration and no one takes care of it.
The Venice Film Festival jury awarded it the main prize – in addition to two other prizes – “because its theme is astonishing and its formal proposition masterful. It’s a radical gesture that brings the off-camera to life, showing us only touches, blurred images, stolen pixels. The story and setting are dictated by testimonies. The director places us next to women prisoners, without making any judgment on their value and it is one of the marvels of poetic license in cinema.
The film will now be screened in October at the Valdivia Festival and will be released in cinemas nationwide during the first half of 2024.
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Source: Latercera
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