While watching the Costa Rican film Memories of a Burning Body (Memorias de un cuerpo que arde) – premiering in the Panorama strand of the 74th Berlinale – as a woman, the film makes you aware of how much of the sexual talk and the act itself is repressed and thought of as a taboo. In conversation with the writer-director Antonella Sudasassi Furniss and the beautiful leading lady Sol Carballo gave us an insight of how the women in Costa Rica deal with the issues of sexuality after the 60s.
“I believe after doing my first film (The Awakening of the Ants), I had many questions of how it was for my grandmother to grow up in a Catholic and very repressive society and therefore I started talking with my grandmother from my father’s side and that conversation triggered me talking with other women, the conversations initiated certain loops for topics which then became part of my storyline,” said Antonella.
While traveling for her first film, she encountered a lot of women talking to her about their experiences, about how they dealt with violence that they lived, which started a thought process of how it was for her grandmother, who bore 11 children, the last one born when she thought she had her menopause.
“I often wondered if she wanted that pregnancy, did she enjoy her sex life, for she had 11 children and had two miscarriages. But I couldn’t talk to her, as she was dead. It was this idealization of love that made me wonder what it was for them growing up and how did they enjoy their sexuality,” she added, “Though things have changed in this society thanks to women’s empowerment, and I hope that they are enjoying their sexuality, although domestic violence exists as the society is still patriarchal and it still looks at women as objects still in the world.
She thinks it is a healing process, like how women have changed, improved but there is still room to grow. The women might be able to enjoy their sexuality, but abortion is still banned and the young women in my country don’t want to have children.
Antonella relied more on the emotional stories of the older women on their living with their sexuality than on data by NGOs. How it was for them, what they felt. I found that there were a lot of things in common and focused on their stories.
“Sexuality is still a taboo to talk about it, in any age but especially older women, where we like to think of our grandmothers as saints and I wanted to mystify that myth. After a certain age, they sort of tend to disappear, and we don’t have references of older women owning to their sexuality. Most of the characters in cinema too are portrayed as mothers, grandmothers, and not as empowered women. Most of the time female desire is looked at as something wrong. When I was young, I was taught that a woman does not have her own desire but be a submissive woman. Though the situation may be changing for the young women, the older women (after 65) have no such options; they must suppress their desires, can’t have boyfriends, you have to stay quite in the background.”
Antonella added that even the name of the film is related to a line from the film. “The name of the film just popped in my mind. I wanted to have fire… there was a phrase in the film where the protagonist asks for a fireman to put out this fire inside me… I knew it had to do with fire and desire. And all these conversations are their stories which led to this beautiful name for the film.”
Thinking about the changes in societies, the director said, “I think the things are slowly changing and I am hopeful especially with the testimonies of these women who have shared their stories with me on screen. Seeing them, hearing them have empowered them and am hoping for them to have a better life.”
