One Way or Another by Sara Gómez
The Brooklyn Academy of Music will be screening the three Latin American landmark films as part of its upcoming series “In the Images, Behind the Camera: Women’s Political Cinema, 1959—1992,” taking place May 6-12 in New York City and drawing together women filmmakers from the Global South and its diasporas working from the 1960s to 1990s to exercise political authority in the realm of cinema.
The three Latin American films selected by the series’ programmer Yasmina Price are the 1959 Venezuelan feature Araya by Margot Benacerraf; the 1972 Colombian medium-length Chircales by Marta Rodriguez; and the 1974 Cuban film One Way or Another / De cierta manera by Sara Gómez.
A tone poem, a documentary, a rarely seen masterpiece of Latin America cinema— Benacerraf’s brilliant documentary-narrative hybrid follows a day in the life of three families in the salt marshes of northeastern Venezuela. This landmark of both neorealist and feminist South American cinema captures their hard-fought, almost ritualized existence with images of breathtaking beauty in black-and-white. After viewing the film, Jean Renoir told Benacerraf, “Above all… don’t cut a single image.”
Rodríguez’s Chircales, the collaboratively-made Marxist documentary is an intimate look at the life of a family of brickmakers on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia which sparks a broader critique of the exploitation of workers.
Afro-Cuban filmmaker Gómez’s radical narrative-documentary hybrid—the first feature directed by a Cuban woman—examines the interplay of race, gender, and class in Castro’s Cuba. Charting the rocky romance between a teacher and a factory worker, One Way or Another serves as a reckoning with both the successes and shortcomings of the revolution.
For more information and tickets visit: www.bam.org/film/2022/womens-political-cinema
