The theatrical release of the reproductive rights documentary film Fly So Far / Nuestra libertad, which was scheduled to take place on August 16, was canceled in Salvador this week following local threats by threats from local pro-life organizations and conservative forces in the country. The news of the cancelation of the theatrical release was announced by the film’s production company Pråmfilm in a press release that was made public yesterday, and that has been reported in different media outlets.
Directed by Swiss-Salvadorean filmmaker Celina Escher Fly So Far has played at numerous international film festivals including Hot Docs, Seattle, Guadalajara, Costa Rica, AFI Latin America, and DocsMx, winning several awards. The documentary tells the story of Teodora Vásquez, a woman in El Salvador who was in the ninth month of her second pregnancy when she fainted and suffered a stillbirth.
When she woke up at the hospital, she was accused of murder and was sentenced to thirty years in prison for aggravated homicide. At Ilopango Women’s Prison, she becomes the spokesperson for The Seventeen, a group of working-class women who were all incarcerated after having miscarriages. Many of them became pregnant after being sexually assaulted.
Fly So Far is a story of collective resistance, activism, sisterhood, as well as the self-determination and agency of women set in a country with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, including the criminalization of those who experience miscarriages and other obstetric emergencies.
Production company Pråmfilm and the film’s director call for solidarity for the right to freedom of expression in their press release, in which they chronicle that on August 14, the hosting theater of the theatrical release in the country’s capital of San Salvador received a letter from conservative groups “in which they presented legal threats and defamatory arguments against the protagonists of the film to stop its premiere.”
The cinema dismissed the arguments of the letter, however, since the country has been is in a state of exception imposed by President Nayib Bukele to tackle gang-related violence since March, the theater decided to cancel the release as there was legal certainty or constitutional rights to “guarantee that a possible legal process would proceed according to the logic of the law.”
Watch the film’s trailer:
