2024-03-16 09:03:20
In director Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland, women rule and men exist only in their shadow. The utopian idea from last year’s film was far from the first. More than 100 years ago, the Bengali thinker Rokeja Hosen came up with a similar vision. Now her Land of Women has been revived by Spanish animator Isabel Herguera. The film, titled The Sultan’s Dream, will be presented at the One World festival, which starts next Wednesday, March 20.
The film The Sultan’s Dream will be presented at the One World festival on March 23 and again on March 26, with a debate following the screening on both days. | Video: One World
Inés is a young Spanish animator who is currently dealing with a complicated partner relationship. By chance, she wanders into a bookstore, where she discovers a feminist utopia from 1905 called The Sultan’s Dream. It comes from the pen of educator and activist Rokeja Hosen from then-British India.
Inés solves her life problems and at the same time follows in Rokeja’s footsteps. He discovers her fictional Land of Women, where women rule wisely and men are locked up at home. “Imaginations of a world dominated by women have been here since ancient times. Rokeja wrote about it more than a hundred years ago. Kristina Pisanská even six hundred years ago,” says the author of the film. Pisanská was a writer originally from Italy.
In 2012, the producers advised director Isabel Herguera not to associate the film with the word feminism. Today the situation is different. | Photo: archive of Isabel Herguera
Sixty-three-year-old director Isabel Herguera admits that she herself sometimes dreams of such a place. “About a space where we could feel safe. But Women’s Land isn’t the best solution either. The roles just get reversed there. And I don’t want men to have to go through what we’re going through. It would just be good to talk about they knew to taste it. To be able to imagine the world from a woman’s point of view,” she says.
However, Roke’s world offers a different perspective to women as well. According to Isabel Herguera, they take a lot of patterns from their mothers or grandmothers and learn from childhood to minimize the risk of a man harming them. “Most of the time we don’t even think about it. Until we look at ourselves from a man’s point of view. Then we see how ridiculous our traditions or our behavior sometimes are,” says the director.
“Leave feminism out”
Like the heroine of her film, she also became acquainted with Rokeji Hosen’s book by chance. “Only it wasn’t in a bookstore, but in a gallery. It was raining and I was looking for a place where I could hide from the rain,” she says. “As soon as I held the book in my hands, I knew I wanted to make a film about it, even though I had no idea how. The story seemed radical and revolutionary to me, yet it was written by a woman from a very conservative background and no formal education,” she continues.
In addition, Rokeja Hosen, who lived from 1880 to 1932, got married at the age of sixteen. Fortunately for a very enlightened man who supported her activities. In contrast, the film’s protagonist, Inés, has grown up a long time ago, but she still struggles in relationships. “But it doesn’t mean that relationships were easier before. Women simply didn’t have a choice and had to accept their fate, whether happy or unhappy. Now, at least in some parts of the world, we have a choice. But we are gradually getting rid of ideas about how society treats us she said that relationships should look like that. We have to decide what we want ourselves. That’s where it’s more difficult,” the director thinks.
In Sultana’s dream, she mixes reality with imagination, the past with the present, and the life of the heroine Inés with the life of Rokeja Hosen. The magical atmosphere is completed by alternating animation techniques – the director uses watercolor drawings, the principle of shadow theater and the traditional Indian technique of mehndi, which we mainly know as body decoration with henna. She learned Spanish directly in the South Asian country.
Isabel Herguera traveled to India regularly, just as her heroine visited places connected with the life of a thinker, intensively sketched and absorbed the atmosphere in order to faithfully transfer it to the picture. According to her, repeated drawing and capturing the essence of a given place is necessary – after all, drawing should be as intuitive as writing.
Before working on the film itself, she held several workshops with Indian women to see if the subject was still relevant. According to her, the women there face two extremes – the very modern and radical and the traditional and ancient at the same time. In Europe, non-European feminist thinkers and activists are not well known, which, according to the director, is a matter of ignorance. “However, the feminist struggle has been going on there forever,” she says.
Isabel Herguera created a specific magical atmosphere with a watercolor drawing. | Photo: One world
The film is the first full-length work of the Spanish native. Due to the difficulty of animation, it took ten years to create, mainly due to fundraising and trips to India. During this time, the social situation also changed significantly.
“I found the book in 2012, and at that time feminism did not have a good reputation. When I talked with Spanish producers, they advised me to leave out the word feminism,” she recalls. Back then, no one would want to support such a thing. Today, according to her, the situation has significantly improved and feminism is almost trendy. “The word also causes much less conflict. I just use it to put my film in a certain context,” he praises the shift.
It could be said that Isabel Herguera fulfilled the message of her film when she became the first woman whose feature-length animated work was selected for the prestigious festival in San Sebastián, Spain. “It’s our fight for us women to be seen. A grain of sand to another grain. This is how I contributed my grain,” she says.
The Sultan’s Dream will have its Czech premiere at the One World festival. “Take inspiration, motivation, or maybe just an idea from it,” the author tells Czech viewers.
Video: Men are piggy banks, women give birth to children. The Czech Republic is completely distorted, says Silvie Lauder
“In the Czech Republic, there is a strong belief that it is mainly women who should take care of children and the household,” journalist Silvie Lauder said in the Spotlight show last year. | Video: Jakub Zuzánek