Violeta Mora y Laura Bermúdez en conversación,
program available from July 1 to August 1st, 2021.
I believe in a cinema as a space for dialogues and encounters. On this occasion, I have had the opportunity to immerse myself in the creative paths explored by Violeta Mora, a dear friend and Honduran filmmaker, who is currently in her last year of a documentary film career at the Film School in San Antonio de lo Baños. For two weeks in June of this year we maintained a digital correspondence, reflecting and sharing about her approach to cinema from memories, fissures and absences in her short films Impossible to Find Something by Looking, Háblame and Mpaka.
- Laura Bermúdez
IMPOSIBLE TO FIND SOMETHING BY LOOKING by Violeta Mora / 2020 / 8 min/ HD/ Honduras
Monday, May 31
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Hello Violeta, how are you?
I am very excited about this creative-epistolary dialogue.
I saw Impossible to Find Something by Looking. I watched it three times, it made me feel many things.
I wanted to start by asking you about the creative "trigger" that inspired you to make this short: where does it emerge from? How do memories run through your cinema? I know that this is a very strong axis in your work.
Attached is an image that came to mind while I was watching.
A big hug - looking forward to continuing.
Laura
Tuesday, June 1
San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba
Laura dear,
I am also very excited about this conversation, surely very close despite the distance.
Two years ago and for a while I went for a walk almost every day at sunrise and sunset, not really knowing what I was looking for but, nevertheless, looking forward to finding it. In one of those walks and in the middle of a field I found this cabin, I returned to it several times feeling each time that when I arrived I would no longer find it.
A few days later, a close friend asked me if I could take care of her apartment, I said yes. One of the glass windows looked out onto the field where the cabin was and nearby, on a table, her son had left a toy telescope. I had my camera on me and I wanted to film the cabin from a distance, I was sure I would find it but, in the end, it was not like that. That search for the cabin are the images that make up Impossible.
The material was stored on my hard drive for more than a year, and a few months ago I decided to approach it with the intention of working from what it made me feel. The first impressions were the starting point to begin writing. Little by little, memories and sensations that I have been carrying and that allow me to relate not only to the images and sounds with which I work, but also to the world, crept in again.
It makes me very happy to know that the short made you feel things, it also makes me curious to know what these feelings were, although I like the idea of imagining them. I still do not understand that impulse, as I say there: Finding always lasts very little.
I think my relationship with memories has to do with absences, also with carrying a certain nostalgia for the future, for what could have been. It seems to me that memories go through my cinema because they go through me in inexplicable ways. In some way or many, they always end up being present. That answer is part of what I'm looking for.
As the image that you’ve shared says, you have to learn the art of seeing - and it seems to me that one must learn to see not only with the eyes but with all the senses and also at all times. Perhaps the gap between the memory of the past and that of the future is where you can search and find better.
I also send you a big hug and look forward to your answer,
Violeta
HÁBLAME by Violeta Mora / 2020 / 6 min/ HD/ Honduras
Monday, June 7
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Hello Violeta, how are you doing?
I really appreciate what you shared with me about working with your archives based on what they made you feel back then - in a very intuitive way you found your narrative paths. The short film moved me to my personal search for certain pieces, which I need to find in my own history, fragments and memories deep in my unconscious mind. At the same time, I related it to the moon and the expansion and contraction cycles of life itself.
Concerning Háblame;
Within that eye that seeks and explores, you managed to simultaneously weave an intimate and collective story. In your creation process, how do you work your own voice as a narrative resource?
There is a particular image in your short which stuck with me and I feel it has to do with those fissures shared between us women.
I share your same feeling about nostalgia. Although it is said that the word "saudade" is indefinable, I like to think that it is all that remains, of what was not. Do you feel that your cinematographic search will continue along the path of absences?
A hug,
Laura
Tuesday, June 8
San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba
Laura, how are you? I am very well. In a few days I will leave for a few weeks to search and find a movie, I'll tell you all about it when I return.
Some time ago I was talking to someone about how the unconscious leaves its mark on what we film, how specific situations or images work like a magnet and suddenly we are there, filming the same thing again disguised as something else. I like to think of it like that, thanks for framing it in that way.
Háblame was a process of searching from the beginning. Part of the process was trying to understand how the dynamics of power and violence that the army practices over our country end up sneaking into the private lives of many of us. I knew I wanted to film in that space so I went every day, waiting for something to happen. At the same time, I was writing the voiceover. It is split between fragments of my diary and conversations I had with women at other times. Usually I am accumulating information and, as the process of the film progresses, I am discarding. The voice has been present in almost everything I have done. It is the way to say through the movies many things that I would not dare to express in person and I have always used my own voice to be able to improvise on the recording. It is difficult for me to control the intention and close the texts, so I begin to repeat what I have written until it passes through my body in a less conscious way and thus I can access other words or phrases that I could not or did not dare to write before.
I suppose that the image you are referring to is that of the butterfly. For me it was very shocking to find it. I was still processing the proximity of the violence and when I saw it flapping about without being able to escape. I then understood much better those wounds that we share. That was the last shot I recorded.
It is difficult to answer the question of absences. I think that my search will continue there if I continue to find that magnet that I mentioned at the beginning. There is also the possibility that making films can fill those gaps, representing those absences and that, little by little, my themes change. We will find out soon enough.
I also send you a big hug,
Violeta
MPAKA by Violeta Mora / 2020 / 10 min/ HD/ Cuba, Honduras
Thursday, June 10
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Hello Violeta,
What a pleasure it is to receive your correspondence.
You're nearing your cinematographic journey, right?
In fact, the image I mentioned is that of the butterfly. It seems incredible to me how such a single image provokes shared feelings and can symbolically connect women. Without a doubt, being able to feel, name and talk about that claustrophobic feeling that runs through us is the first step towards freedom. Thanks for that.
About Mpaka:
Your story took me to several places, including the allegory of Plato's cave. The human shadows of an industrial and urban world as an apparent and deceptive reality. The natural, spiritual and mystical world as the essence and the core of existence. How was the collective experience with your team to find and tell this story? How were those talks and creative meetings to achieve this piece?
Intuitively, I saved this short for last and I have no regrets. That last shot of Mpaka seems ideal to me to close our first cinematic epistolary meeting, as a call to cross dimensions and open our eyes.
A hug,
Laura
—
Viernes 11 de Junio
San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba
Laura dear,
I'm leaving in a few hours and while I'm trying to find the words to tell you my expectations about the trip and the desired movie, I look around me and I find this phrase by Calasso that I placed on my desk a few days ago, it seems to me a good summary of everything that one could say.
What is desire? There’s nothing before the eyes, behind the eyes, something burns: an image, a few words that repeat themselves obsessively or a single one.
What you mention about feeling, naming and talking about what goes through us is important as a step towards freedom. I remember hearing my mother say sometimes that what hurts must be spoken many times, that each time we say it the pain diminishes until one day it no longer hurts. Being able to speak it also with images and sounds is a great privilege.
The experience when making Mpaka was very particular, it is the only short I have made with a complete team and, since it was an academic exercise, we had to do it on the spot, with the times and the production model proposed by the school. At that time, I had not been able to return to Honduras for 3 years and, without knowing it, those feelings were creeping into the process all the time, making it difficult for me to face the spaces as they were. I began to approach it from the sensations - this implied being able to understand them enough to explain to the team what it was that the places brought up in me; Many times we talked in the spaces, other times we departed from sonic or pictorial references, sometimes it was simply impossible to express what was going through my head so we shared a little rum.
One day a religious man named Alberto appeared, then a brick kiln, and little by little we were finding how the spaces were in dialogue with each other and the film took its course. We felt it necessary to transfer history to a kind of no place that would distance us from pre-concepts about Cuba; the construction of that new space was the starting point for sound design. It was a very playful and fun process. Even in the location scouting we tried to find positions from where to record the sound and objects that would give us clues to that other place; I remember us testing microphones inside barrels, pipes, near and far from water. Regarding music, Alberto was our guide. The day we met him he was playing the drum and seeing him perform was a magnet.
I was fortunate enough to have a team by my side that ventured with me to work from a place of uncertainty and to play with what the spaces gave us. It was important for me to put my subjectivity in dialogue with that of other people, especially because each one came from a different country, with different experiences and different ways of relating to the world.
Laura, thank you very much for the exchange and for accompanying me to remember these processes. Let's keep opening our eyes, ears and crossing dimensions.
I also send you a big hug,
Violeta
With the intention of opening a space for conversation, we invite our community to ask Laura and Violeta questions and, in this way, participate and expand this epistolary dialogue.
We will post the selected questions and answers on this page during the month of July.
Violeta Mora (1990) is a filmmaker and visual artist. Her work has been developed, mostly, in the audiovisual area. She has directed some documentary and experimental short films such as Rastros, Mpaka, Háblame and Frontera. She also explores the possibilities of embroidery through the Lunatic Spider project. Her works have been exhibited and screened in different museums and film festivals in Central America, Mexico, Spain, England and the Netherlands. She is currently a final year student of documentary directing at EICTV, Cuba.
Laura Bermúdez (Honduras /Brazil , 1987) studied documentary film at the Getulio Vargas FGV Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Negra soy, her latest short film, received the Audience Award in the section “Affirming the Rights of Women” at the Malaga Spanish Film Festival (2018) and was an official selection at the Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival in England that same year. She was selected as a director in the programs “Berlinale Talents” (2021) and “Guadalajara Talents” (2018). She has received scholarships from the American Film Showcase program, the Locarno Industry Academy, the Goethe Institute and the Ibermedia program to receive international documentary film laboratories.
She is co-founder and active member of the Honduran Filmmakers Collective where the Film Festival Created by Women “El Sueño de Alicia (Alice’s Dream)” is held every year in the framework of November 25th International Day of Non-Violence Against Women and the school of cinema with a gender perspective in Honduras entitled “Una Mirada Propia (A Gaze of Your Own)” with the support of the Cultural Center of Spain in Tegucigalpa and the Central American Fund of Women FCAM.
She has been a part of international short film jury in the Cali Short Film Festival in Colombia and the Latin American Film Festival in La Plata, Argentina FESAALP and the regional short film competition of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration CABEI.
Winner of the research fund and story line writing of the Gabriel García Márquez Stimulus (2017), the ECAMC production fund (2020) and the Miradas fund awarded by Ambulante and Netflix (2021) for her first documentary feature film ALLÁ DONDE EL SOL NACE (Where the Sun Rises), supported by the Mexican Institute of Cinematography IMCINE.