6 - Mother's Body, Daughter's Voice: Female Genealogy, Invasión and Cinema in La mirada de Myriam

Summary

The short film La mirada de Myriam (1986) is an example of the work of the women's film collective Cine Mujer. This piece, directed by Clara Riascos, represents one of their most accomplished productions, and probably the most ‘canonical’, given that it is the only Cine Mujer film to be included in the ‘Maletas de Cine Colombiano’. Its modernist belief in agency, its preoccupation with oppressed groups, and strong belief in women's power to effect change and to mobilize testifies to the legacy of the New Latin American Cinema as well as to second-wave feminist discourse. In the late 1970s discourses of international development and feminist discourses converged with the growth in cinematic production associated with the New Latin American Cinema, precipitating an increase in women-directed audiovisual media in Latin America, with collectives such as Lilith in Brazil and Grupo Miércoles in Venezuela engaged in similar endeavours during the same period. As Ilene Goldman points out, Cine Mujer was by far the most successful and enduring of these groups, remaining in existence until 1999 and producing a wide range of both fiction and documentary film and video (Arboleda Ríos and Osorio, pp. 229–47). Cine Mujer's founding members, Sara Bright and Eulalia Carrizosa, worked together on reproductive rights projects before forming Cine Mujer in 1978 with others including Riascos, who was studying film in Bogotá.