Malqueridas
- CHILE, GERMANY / 2023 / Spanish / Color / DCP / 74 min
Director: Tana Gilbert
Script: Tana Gilbert, Paola Castillo Villagrán, Javiera Velozo, Karina Sánchez
Editing: Javiera Velozo, Tana Gilbert
Sound: Carlo Sanchez, Janis Grossmann-Alhambra
Producer: Paola Castillo Villagrán
Co-producer: Dirk Manthey (Dirk Manthey Film)
Production Company: Errante
World Sales: Square Eyes
The film offers a glimpse into scenes of the everyday lives of women incarcerated in a Chilean prison, where filming is prohibited but is carried out in secret on mobile phones. Here are images of children born behind bars, distant family members, and their fellow inmates—who are at once like both lovers and family. In order to resist the risk of these seemingly quotidian scenes being deleted and lost forever, and to give it permanence, the director printed out all of the footage and filmed it again. Blending testimonies and footage of multiple women, the texture of the image—formed by rough digital pixels replaced by ink— is neither digital or analog, and it unfolds an intimate narrative of their lives as women, mothers and prisoners. (YH)
[Director’s Statement] Since my first short films, care, prison, and gender roles have mobilized my artistic reflections. This is a work created between them and us, challenging the dominant narrative and preserving their stories, existence, and humanity. With their clandestine cell phone footage from inside the prison, we create a collective story that reconstructs their experiences and affections. The narrative emerges from extensive conversations with more than twenty women, reinterpreted through the experience of one of them, Karina. Each frame of the film has been printed and re-digitized in order to give these images a physical presence, making them enduring and impossible to erase. In this way, the film contains a collective memory that raises a question about the value of images: creating images means appropriating reality and making it our own.
Tana GilbertChilean filmmaker. Her short documentaries have been screened internationally at festivals such as Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, the Montreal International Documentary Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival, Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid, and the Valdivia International Film Festival, among others. She has a master’s degree in Documentary Film from the University of Chile and teaches film courses in different Chilean universities. She was selected for the Academy at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2019. This is her first feature film.