VERDICT: Communal mythologies and the importance of historical forebears are explored in Marina Herrera’s quietly humorous hybrid documentary about a rebellious Indigenous woman.
In the late 18th century, Tomasa Ttito Condemayta was a leading figure in the uprising against colonial Spanish rulers in Peru, playing a major role in mobilising Indigenous women. In Marina Herrera’s first short as a director, Heroines, she uses the story and collective memory of Tomasa as the inspiration for a playful and funny hybrid documentary. It imagines a shrine dedicated to the revolutionary – complete with her skull placed on display, like a holy relic – to which the local women come to ask for guidance and divine intervention.
While not quite as broad in its comedy as the term ‘mockumentary’ might suggest to some, Herrera injects the film with various funny elements and embraces them when they occur naturally. This is evident from the opening moments in which the camera pans along the queue of women patiently waiting to pay their respects at the shrine, each brandishing a machete as an offering to Tomasa’s defiant zeal. When one of the women cleaning the shrine unwraps a gift left on the altar to reveal a shiny new meat cleaver, she could easily have turned and given a look to the camera – akin to something like The Office – and it wouldn’t have been out of place. In another instance, an apparently mundane conversation between two women takes a hilarious turn when it transpires that the goat the younger one has brought to be killed for supper has the name Tomasa.
The film is not a send-up, however. Instead, Herrera uses this amusing framework to bring to the surface the real observations, thoughts, and fears of the women living in the same place that Tomasa once did over 200 years ago. Some explain directly, in talking-head fashion, the kinds of concerns that come to the shrine to seek help with. More generally, the ambiguous details of Tomasa’s life have allowed a version of her to emerge as a kind of communal myth that serves the purposes of these local women, who are delighted to have such an icon to celebrate and relate to.
Director: Marina Herrera
Cinematography: Johan Carrasco
Producers Amaru Cardenas
Editor: Marco Panatonic
Sound: Cesar Centeno
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Shorts)
In Spanish and Quechua
21 minutes
