REVIEW
DOCUMENTARY
Canción a una dama en la sombra
[ Song to a lady in the shadow ]
Carolina Astudillo Muñoz Filmmaker
My work as a filmmaker focuses on collecting stories featuring women in different eras , generally marked by war , exile and / or dictatorship . In my films I use materials that were for many years considered to be secondary , as they are related to private life : letters , diaries , family films and photographs .
The British theorist and filmmaker , Laura Mulvey 1 , states that while it is true that oral history has not been exclusive to women , and that documenting and narrating the past through interviews is one of the favourites formats of the feminist methodology , so too is the reconstruction of the past through letters , diaries and other objects .
These necessarily informal sources can reveal an image of the past in which women were central as opposed to marginal and in which -in the absence of public eventstheir daily struggles defied the frontiers that were created .
In 2015 I produced El gran vuelo , a documentary that tells the story of Clara Pueyo Jornet , an activist from the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia ( PSUC ), who -having been sentenced to death in the prison of Les Corts in Barcelona- escaped with a false release order in June 1943 . Since that moment , there has been no trace of her .
1
Where Is History Today ? New Ways of Representing the Past . Marcel Arbeit / Ian Christi . Women Making History : Gleaning and the Compilation - Laura Mulvey .
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Observing Memories Issue 6