Isabel Herguera has called her first feature-length work of animation “a film about the importance of dreams.”
The lyrical, imaginative journey of a young woman that leaps gracefully through time and space as only animation can, Sultana’s Dream is one of those films capable of capturing the viewer in its fascinating parallel world, while still being very much about our world. Jumping from Spain to Italy to India, master animator Isabel Herguera describes the condition of women in different epochs, religions and cultures as hinging on universal truths about their relationship to men.
Overriding all the male dominance and posturing, Herguera’s protagonist Inés imagines a different world, one in which women are free from fear and able to express their talents fully, while the men who pose a threat to their safety are kept at home and rendered harmless doing domestic chores. This is the famous Ladyland, which was originally described in a book written in 1905 by Muslim author and teacher Rokeya Hossain. The ways Herguera finds to put Hossain’s “paradoxical feminist utopia” in a contemporary context continually reinvent the story, with some help from current cultural icons Mary Beard and Paul B. Preciado.
Woven through all these reflections, which are sketched in nervous line drawings in continual movement and in restless shadowy cut-outs, as well as Indian Mehndi tattoo designs, is an intimate love story between Inés and her extroverted Indian lover, which is the hardest male/female connection of them all. Herguera wrote the screenplay with Gianmarco Serra, her partner in life and adventure, but the feeling is that of a very personal journey seen from a woman’s perspective.
Born in San Sebastian in Basque Spain in 1961, Herguera is both a filmmaker and, like Rokeya Hossain, an educator. She has taught experimental animation at the National Istitute of Design in Ahmedabad, India and at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, as well as at the Kunsthochschule fur Medien in Cologne, Germany. Her workshops with women in India laid the foundation for Sultana’s Dream and inspired her to persist over the ten years it took to make the film.
She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Bilbao and from the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, then earned an M.A. in animation at CalArts in the U.S. Then Herguera worked on a number of animated productions in Los Angeles before she returned to Spain to direct the animation festival Animac.
These multi-cultural influences, including her numerous visits to India and her attraction to that country’s cultures, are apparent in her film work, which ranges from Spain Loves You in 1989 and Sing Back and Forth in 1993 to Los muertitos and La gallina ciega, both form 2005. Many aspects of her work, which has won her over 50 awards world-wide, are available to view on the animator’s Vimeo channel https://vimeo.com/isabelherguera.
In her troubling, touching short film Ámár (2010), in which a young woman goes to visit an institutionalized mental patient in India who has been close to her in the past, a version of Inés is clearly visible. Her last shorts before Sultana’s Dream include Under the Pillow (2012), Amore d’inverno (2015) and Kutxa Beltza (2016).
It was in a gallery in New Delhi that the director first picked up the book that would inspire her first feature, a scene that has been recreated in the film itself. As in Ámár, Inés’s travel sketchbooks feature prominently, so that the audience sees the author taking visual notes in 2D ink and watercolor on the film they are viewing. One imagines that autobiographical elements form the backbone of the story, however embellished with fantasy and wrapped in magical, ever-changing images. They add a further layer of complexity to Ines/Rokeya/Isabel’s tale of a free-thinking, independent woman who travels the world, only to find herself in the same old dark labyrinth.
