Malqueridas
Los Angeles Premiere, with an introduction by Abby Sun
Sunday, April 7
5:30pm
2220 Arts + Archives
Director: Tana Gilbert
Chile/Germany, 2023, 75 minutes, DCP
They are women. They are mothers. They are inmates serving long sentences in a prison in Chile. Their children grow up far from them, but remain in their hearts. In prison they find the affection of other inmates who share their same experience. Mutual support among these women becomes a form of resistance and emancipation. Malqueridas reconstructs their stories through the images they themselves shot with cell phones prohibited inside the prison, recovering the collective memory of a forgotten community.
Tana Gilbert’s debut feature is a stunning achievement of archival documentary filmmaking: a collective chronicle of life within a women’s prison in Chile, made entirely from cell-phone camera videos shot clandestinely by the subjects themselves. With a clear eye toward the experience of motherhood and mutual support, Gilbert’s assembled vérité footage was reprinted and digitized, adding a bracing physicality to the images and a poetic lyricism to their stories. The film’s formal beauty is an act of resistance and liberation for women at the margins of society.
In Spanish with English subtitles
Official Selection: Venice Critics Week
Producer: Errante: Paola Castillo Villagrán