Léalo en español
In her emotionally raw and affecting, activism-driven feature debut Malqueridas, screening in the Critics’ Week line-up of the Venice Film Festival, documentarian Tana Gilbert captures what motherhood is like inside Chilean prisons.
Digital recording in Chile’s prisons is a clandestine activity. It is officially forbidden by the rules and able to impact privileges if detected, but common nonetheless, and not a crime. The ease with which images can now be taken on a mobile phone, with the shrinking size and democratisation of digital tech, has enabled Gilbert to collate a view of this world that is more intimate, and prisoner-led, than what is usually depicted in movies about jail life. It also stands apart from the deluge of contemporary films about our always-online social media reality. The most poignant frame through which to consider the mobile-shot imagery in Malqueridas is the family photo — because these furtive snaps are one of the few ways a woman doing time can shore up memories and continue connection with their child.
Gilbert has woven together images taken by more than twenty women serving time in prison, and their testimonies. These have been reconstructed into one composite experience, voiced by Karina (former inmate Karina Sanchez, whose own stories of her time inside are included.) The film is couched very much as a collective project of solidarity. (Gilbert’s own father was imprisoned in the US when she was a child, according to the press notes). Researched and developed over six years, the project was sparked by images uploaded to Facebook by incarcerated women, who Gilbert then personally connected with. So as not to jeopardise their safety, she worked only with women who would already be out at the time of the film’s premiere.
Women are permitted to have their offspring in detention with them until the babies turn two. The prisoners in Malqueridas are serving long sentences, but we never find out what they are in for. Instead of reducing these women to their crimes in a way that reinforces a punitive system, Gilbert shows the emotional cost of their long absence from home and the wider impact on their families. Nor is it a film geared toward garnering evidence of the harsh exercise of institutional power within the jail, though that does come through in brief footage of a cell raid, in which phones are at risk of confiscation. But there are other recollections (a guard pouring water on a woman in a cold isolation cell, so she must sleep in wet clothes, for instance).
Restricted, vertical framing and hurried blurring frustrate our gaze, enforcing a sense these women are walled off from us in a murky, hemmed-in present, with their outside lives a world away, and the future foreshortened. In addition to footage of mothers and babies, there is partying and New Year fireworks, and torrential rain in the yard; impressionistic snatches of existence isolated from the flow of everyday family life. Gilbert, to create something lasting, has had the images printed and redigitised. Despite, or perhaps because of, the slightness of the visual archive, eye-witness details build into a devastating gut-punch.
The standard, moralising condemnation that prisoners have willfully abandoned their children by breaking the law is here rejected in favour of a much more nuanced, sensitive POV of deep empathy and awareness of wider, brutal socio-economic forces at play. Jail time for these mothers means not only the deprivation of freedom in literal terms, but also a loss of human connection, influence and control.
There is real helplessness that comes with relying on others outside as proxy care-givers, especially as they often prove unreliable. A sister on the outside has committed to taking care of two kids, but amid a spiralling drug problem, gives them up to a foster home. The father takes them back after finishing his own term behind bars, but after a relationship breakdown, prevents them from taking calls from their mother. Digital tech can connect outside official channels, but creates new vulnerability to manipulation and withheld access.
Maternal, and sometimes sexual, bonds form inside between prisoners yearning for the comfort of a substitute family. Karina starts a relationship with Maca, which founders under the latter’s drug dependency. The 50-something boss of a neighbouring dorm, Patty, offers stability as Karina’s “jail mom”. Karina in turn nurtures 18-year-old Mari, who is unable to attend her real mother’s funeral due to incarceration. Looking after younger girls becomes a way to cope with the pain and guilt of not seeing their own children, and creates a community of solidarity against institutional violence and the heavy societal stigma that labels them bad parents.
Director: Tana Gilbert
Screenwriters: Tana Gilbert, Paola Castillo Villagran, Javiera Velozo, Karina Sanchez
Producers: Paula Castillo, Dirk Manthey
Editors: Javiera Velozo, Tana Gilbert
Cinematography: Women serving prison sentences
Narrator: Karina Sanchez
Animation: Fanny Leiva Torres
Sound: Carlo Sanchez, Janis Grossmann-Alhambra
Production companies: Errante (Chile), Dirk Manthey Film (Germany)
Sales: Square Eyes
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
In Spanish
74 minutes
