2023-09-25 22:06:05
A young woman waits for her father sitting on a bench in the Retiro in Madrid. She is surrounded by trees, grass, nature. She should be calm, but she can’t. Soon a noise next to her worries her. She looks around her. She tenses. She discovers that there is a male gaze that examines her. She is scared. Her body automatically goes on alert. There will be no turning back. Fear will be a part of her life forever. With this scene she starts The sultana’s dreamthe animated gem with which Isabel Herguera participates in the Official Section of the 71st San Sebastián Festival, which is being held this week in Donostia.
Maestro Miyazaki inaugurates San Sebastian with a beautiful and magical anti-war fable
Further
“Being alert is part of our growth, because there are also those who are alert and willing to commit abuse. It is a hunt, and it goes beyond our economic, social and cultural condition. It is something that all women have in common, wherever you are from,” the filmmaker laments to this newspaper.
Is there a real possibility of change? The woman from San Sebastián believes so, but defends that in order to generate them it is very important to “not remain silent.” And that, to achieve it, you need to believe in them and dream about them: “The dream has the capacity. If we imagine something, perhaps sooner or later we will be able to achieve it. If we don’t dream, we don’t move forward. “I dreamed of making a movie and it’s finally made.”
A milestone in Spanish animation
Herguera debuts with this feature film that has become the first Spanish – and European – animated film to compete for the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Festival. And this type of cinema has been one of the protagonists of the edition since its inauguration last Friday with the screening The boy and the heron, the last film by the master Hayao Miyazaki. It has also been presented They shot the pianist by the duo Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal about the musician Tenório Júnior.
“There is a lot of animation and opening with Miyazaki was a very strong statement of intent on the part of the festival. “An opening of the doors to a way of making films that tends to be diluted in big festivals,” claims the director. Furthermore, she assures that in Spain she is experiencing a great moment and advances: “Next year there are a lot of beautiful projects carried out by women in the oven.”
A feminist utopia
Herguera has been inspired for her debut work by the feminist science fiction story written by Rokeya Hussain, which was published in India in 1905. “I found it by chance in an art gallery in New Delhi where I entered to take refuge from the rain. There I saw a book with a red cover that had an illustration of a woman piloting a spaceship,” she explains. The subtitle warned that it was a “feminist utopia” that she imagined ‘The country of women’: “A place where they have the knowledge and, therefore, the power. While they, who are ignorant, live behind the curtains.”
Inés, the film’s protagonist, makes the same discovery and the film recreates her narration of the volume. In the story, the territory free of patriarchy is called ‘Ladyland’, which immediately reminds us of ‘Barbieland’ from the Greta Gerwig film that has become the great phenomenon of the year since its premiere last July. The San Sebastian director acknowledges that she has not seen the film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and explains that their similarity has been “a coincidence.”
In his feature film, the men are locked at home, secluded and ashamed for not having been able to protect their land from a group of invaders. It was they who achieved it, and without shedding a single drop of blood. To do this, they invented a machine capable of generating such unbearable frequencies of sound that they scared away the enemy forever. Their victory meant that from then on they were the ones who governed and occupied their streets, now safe 24 hours a day.
The filmmaker places knowledge and science in key positions to determine who should lead societies and criticizes that they are two aspects that have historically penalized half of the population: “A woman with knowledge is a threat to men. One of the reasons why Rokeya [la autora del cuento] They married her very young because her upbringing made her a threat. “It was difficult to find a man who wanted to accompany a woman who knew too much.”
Dream to be safe
The film follows the character of Inés on her journeys through India, Italy and San Sebastián, as well as her dates with her lover Àmàr, her search for Rokeya’s tomb, her returns home and her time as a philosophy student. Her scenes include Mary Beard’s real voices, which she extracted from a speech of hers; and the philosopher Paul B. Preciado, who was very inspiring to Herguera for his way of “talking about utopias” in a talk he gave in 2015. Such was his influence that he decided to incorporate him into the script and ask him to actively participate by lending his voice.
The film delves into the character’s reflections on the price it costs women to live under the impositions of patriarchy. And she does it with an animation that turns viewing into a delight. “We decided to paint all the backgrounds before starting the animation, even though the opposite usually happens. We wanted the atmosphere that later determined the characters’ actions to be like paintings. And we paint them by hand. The objective was for there to be a freer and more pictorial vision of everything,” the director details about the creative process.
The trips taken by the protagonist imbue the film with a very rich mix of cultures in which different languages are combined. “It is not necessary to understand everything, but to feel it. They form a sound landscape,” she says days after the approval of the use of official languages in the Congress of Deputies has placed them at the center of the debate.
A debut film at 60
Herguera will premiere in theaters The sultana’s dream next November 17th. A debut feature that the filmmaker completed after she was 60, and with already an extensive career behind her as a visual artist, producer and director of fiction short films. Among them, The blind man’s hen (2006), for which she was nominated for the Goya, However (2010), under the pillow (2012) y Winter Love (2015).
Regarding his jump to feature film, something that he had not considered until he came across Kaguya’s book 10 years ago, he acknowledges: “I should have started earlier because you no longer have as much energy. Although at the same time it has arrived when it had to arrive. It has been a mountain and I have been afraid in many cases; “But I knew I had the job and the confidence that we would go to the end.”
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