God Is a Woman by Andrés Peyrot
Two Latin American films were announced this morning as official selection in the 38th edition of Venice Critics’ Week, running August 30 to September 9 alongside the Venice Film Festival: the documentary God Is a Woman by Swiss-Panamanian director Andrés Peyrot, and the Chilean documentary Malqueridas by Tana Gilbert.
Peyrot’s God Is a Woman was selected as the opening night film of the Venice independent sidebar. In 1975, French Oscar-winning director Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau travelled to Panama to film the Kuna community, where women are sacred. Gaisseau, his wife and their little girl Akiko lived with the Kunas for a year. The project eventually ran out of funds and a bank confiscated the reels. Fifty years later, the Kunas are still waiting to discover “their” film, now a legend passed down from the elders to the new generation; and one day, a hidden copy was found in Paris.
Gilbert’s Malqueridas is an ensemble story built through images recorded with cell phones by women living in a Chilean correctional facility. These women are prisoners serving long sentences in a correctional facility in Chile, and their children grow up far from them, but remain in their hearts. In prison, they find affection in other partners who share their situation. Mutual support among these women becomes a form of resistance and empowerment. Malqueridas constructs their stories through images captured by them with banned cell phones inside the prison, recovering the collective memory of an abandoned community.
God Is a Woman is screening out of competition, while Malqueridas is in the run for the €5,000 Grand Prize and the €3,000 Audience Award.
