Léalo en español
Swiss-Panamanian documentary director Andrés Peyrot expects a lot from his audience with his fascinating though flawed debut God is a Woman. Wary of the problematic nature of an outsider’s gaze when shooting indigenous communities, and mindful of the post-colonialist dictum that it’s not the responsibility of non-hegemonic groups to explain themselves to those in power, Peyrot allows most of this story of a rediscovered film shot among Panama’s Kuna people to be told by those within the community. While laudable in principle, the result in this case is that so many questions remain unanswered that we’re moved by the emotions generated yet mentally taken out of the film by all the unaddressed issues and details. It’s a true Catch-22 situation: do you make a documentary for the people you’re filming, or do you make it for an international arthouse crowd who’ll be sympathetic in a neoliberal sort of way? Regardless, God is a Woman has a strong enough story and visuals to earn it an enviable passport.
In 1975, French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, winner of the 1962 best documentary Oscar for the now forgotten The Sky Above, the Mud Below, traveled with his wife and daughter to Ustupo, an island off the coast of Panama. He’d heard that the Kuna people there were a matriarchal society whose initiation ceremonies were an all-female affair, so he set out to make a documentary called God is a Woman, showing this exceptional society whose proud traditions were barely touched by modern technology. Or at least, that’s what he wished to convey. Luck was not on his side however: his financing fell through, the print was confiscated by the bank, and all trace was lost.
Peyrot learned about this when he was invited to the island by Orgun Wagua, a young Kuna filmmaker (also here as associate producer). Speaking with the locals, the director was moved by the community’s desire to see footage of themselves from nearly fifty years ago, yet no one could trace any surviving images. The Kuna remembered that Gaisseau had an agenda, ignoring explanations that their society was more gender-balanced than matriarchal and insisting that few signs of modernity were captured in his frames, yet the knowledge that loved ones and traditional ceremonies had been caught on film, with no way to see it now, was a source of frustration.
Together with Kuna poet and professor Arysteides Turpana, Peyrot tracked down a print at Panama’s Ministry of Culture, but the reels were rusty and vinegar syndrome had set in, leaving the celluloid beyond preservation. Two years later, after Turpana’s death, a print was discovered in Paris at the CNC (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée); the archive embarked on a restoration that brought back the complete film, with apparently only small sections damaged by solarization.
The heart of Peyrot’s film is composed of scenes of Gaisseau’s documentary returning to Ustupo. Fabric is bought to make a screen, a seamstress stitches the cloth together, and the daughters of Laida Diaz de Prestan, one of whom appears in the film but hasn’t been back home for twenty-two years, flies back to be in the emotion-filled audience. It’s a beautiful moment in which the community’s sense of pride is tangible: notwithstanding the original’s well-meaning but colonialist voiceover, the Kuna take back their images, filtering them through their own memories and culture rather than a Western ethnographer’s viewpoint. And that has real power.
What Peyrot’s documentary is not good at is giving the viewer information. By the end we know very little about Kuna society and next to nothing about how they came to be labeled a matriarchal culture. We know from performed re-enactments of the 1925 Revolution that the Kuna rose up against the army, but we never learn what was the outcome, and while we’re told that they’ve largely given up on traditional farming, we have no sense of how those remaining on the island survive economically. It’s as if Peyrot is so careful not to be seen as yet another outsider pointing his camera at indigenous peoples that he completely avoids any anthropological element, with the result that we’re left with a sense of some strong-willed individuals but not a distinctive culture apart from the women’s marvelously colorful clothing. We also learn little about Gaisseau and his family, whether his Kuna film had ever been screened before confiscation, nor how a print got to the CNC.
Editing between scenes is one of the culprits, as are unnecessary re-enactments, such as Turpana’s clearly staged arrival at the reception desk of the Ministty of Culture, though within each sequence the rhythms work nicely. There’s a nice resonance to scenes of those who participated in the original documentary standing against a wall with images from the film projected over their bodies, and the personalities being followed, including Turpana, Diaz de Prestan and Wagua, have so much character and intelligence that our emotional bonding helps to minimize questions which perhaps are better answered by the internet.
Director: Andrés Peyrot
Screenplay: Andrés Peyrot, Elizabeth Wautlet
With: Arysteides Turpana, Laida Diaz de Prestan, Olonigdi Chiari, Cebaldo Inawinapi, Orgun Wagua, Duiren Wagua, Demetria Prestan Diaz, Demetriana Prestan Diaz, Sidsagi Inatoy
Producers: Brieuc Dréano, Andrés Peyrot, Johan De Faria, Sebastian Deurdilly, Bénédicte Perrot
Co-producer: Xavier Grin
Associate producers: Orgun Wagua, Duiren Wagua, Isabella Gálvez Peñafiel, Moisés Gonzalez
Cinematography: Patrick Tresch, Nicolas Desaintquentin
Editing: Sabine Emiliani
Music: Grégoire Auger
Sound: Luis Bravo, Luis Lasso, Damien Perrollaz & Samy Bardet
Production companies: Industrie Films (France), Upside Films (France), P.S. Productions (Switzerland), in association with Wagua Films (Panama), Mente Pública (Panama)
World sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Venice (Critics Week); Toronto (TIFF Docs)
In Spanish, Kuna, French, English
86 minutes
