By Morella Moret and José Sarmiento Hinojosa

A struggle poem is sung, thousands of women join to rebel against patriarchy and misogyny every March 9th, but we’re still abused. We’re killed because we’re rebels, raped because we’re whores, beaten for being insolent. Sangre Seca by Los Ingrávidos Collective shows us 16mm red and bloody images, footage of woman marching for our rights, of different historical moments of Mexican activism. In the background we hear a poem, a rebel song of a woman claiming for us, talking about the disturbances in Salvador de Atenco in 2006 where, in top of all the atrocities committed against human rights, 26 women were raped and abused. They ask to be heard, to be seen, not to be ignored. They ask for reflection and for unity, so we can celebrate women and not cry anymore deaths.

Beyond the texture of 16mm, the dying of red turns the footage into an urgent document of protest: the cause is bleeding, the images, stained by the corporeal manifestation of suffering and death, turn into revelations, into a statement of unity and courage, into an entity that breathes life to a cause. And the path traveled many times is setting the footprints in concrete, so many kilometers traveled for the same cause, but for more victims, each day, a new memory, a new ritual, a new mourning. Sangre Seca is a brave document of resistance, one that claims to be seen over and over.

In the forgotten, in the dead soil and desert bugs, a geologist retires to grow old, wait and die. In Brigid McCaffrey’s Bad mama, who cares we observe the time go by through the daylight that slowly enters the confinement. In a dark house we see only little glimpses of day through the curtains, the shadows change according the passing of time. The film shows the infinite lethargy of the routine, and we manage to perceive through it the warmth of living, the solitude of existence. The filmmaker experiments in the face of the geologist old woman, transforming her in a cyclops and then in a strabic animal. All is repeated, the same shadows, the same woman seeing without looking.

In the realm of shadows and phantasmagoria, the darkness infuses the image like a remembrance of death. Faces of time lived, of experiences like scars in a map are shown magnificently against the cruelty of light, which depicts every road traveled, every circumstance that lead to this stasis, a life in pause waiting for the inevitable. It is inevitable, it will be engraved in our tombstone, but the waiting, the calm and resigned count of our final hours, may be dealt with dignity, with the remarkable stature of a life well lived. In this experiment of light, light distorts the face as waiting or searching for a definitive answer, the final words that we will say before dying, the ultimate testimony of mankind.

Sangre Seca
Directed by: Colectivo los Ingrávidos

Bad Mama, Who Cares
Filmmaker: Brigid McCaffrey
Producer: Brigid McCaffrey
USA
2016
12’