Women have been honored this year in the world of cinema: the Berlinale, the Venice Film Festival, and also the Festival de San Sebastiàn have rewarded powerful, inspired, and often very political females.
The #MeToo movement, which started in the world of cinema with the Weinstein affair seems, finally, to be bearing fruit.
Alcarràs
The year 2022 started for women with a Golden Bear for the Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón for her film Alcarràs.
The film is an ode to small farmers, which takes place over the course of a summer in a corner of Catalonia bathed in sunlight, and highlights the future of agriculture and farmers, shaken by modernity.
It is a contemporary drama with social concerns assumed by the director.
“It (her film ” Alcarras”, ed) doesn’t really have a happy ending because there’s not much hope in family farming right now. But I think it’s also a movie about family and the importance of taking care of each other and being together in times of crisis,” explained Simón.
All The Beauty And The Bloodshed
An eminently political film has also won one of the greatest awards in cinema this year: the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a true story about an internationally renowned photographer and activist Nan Goldin and her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis in the US.
Laura Poitras won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2014 for her film Citizenfour about whistleblower Edward Snowden, following him on his clandestine escape to Asia.
“Documentary is cinema. It always is. For me, first and foremost,” said Poitras. “I’m a filmmaker and I’m also somebody who cares about politics and justice. But I’m here to represent this as a film.”
The King Of The World
The Festival of San Sebastian also rewarded the Colombian Laura Mora.
In The Kings of the World, Mora plunges into the depths of Colombia’s internal conflict, with a film about five young people from impoverished neighbourhoods of Medellin, with actors from those very areas.
“It has been a very difficult film to make,” Mora explained. “We have been working for a year with this wonderful cast. They have taught us everything about life, the difficulty and the beauty of life”.
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