Las muertes chiquitas

This full-length documentary addresses the relationship between women and orgasm. The five-hour film is the result of interviews and conversations with 30 Mexican women of different ages, social strata, professions, and ideologies who link pleasure with power, armed struggle, femicide, colonialism, transsexuality, prostitution, illness, exile, the plurality of the Mexican identity, and the ethical commitment of art to the sociopolitical reality.

The film will be shown in two sessions, lasting two and a half hours each. The second session will close with a conversation between Mireia Sallarès and Marta Segarra after the screening.

Las muertes chiquitas
Mireia Sallarès / 2009 / México / 286 min / VO (es)

“Of a feminine appearance and with a masculine voice, Natalia, one of the women interviewed by Mireia Sallarès for Las Muertes Chiquitas challenges the viewer. Whether it is in the domain of her gaze or her discourse, Natalia resists classification under any sexual gender heading. The same thing happens with Sallarès’ project, a video, a series of photos, and an installation about that way women relate with orgasm (“little death”, as it is widely known in Mexico), power, violence and other clichés associated with gender theory: it resists pigeonholing into any particular category of artistic production. By blurring the bounds between artistic genres, this trans-disciplinary, liminal piece with its social agency not only questions art, but also feminism and media theory.”

Laura González Flores

 

“Orgasm, like the earth, belongs to those who work it. This is the idea articulated by several voices engaged in the project, which the Catalan artist Mireia Sallarès undertook in a long journey of almost four years in different states of the Mexico, in the company of her camera and a luminous neon sign saying “Las muertes chiquitas” [Little Deaths] ... Orgasms—female orgasms in this case—shared or solitary, cathartic or frustrated, are a possible starting point for establishing public-private, political-erotic nexuses … linking pleasure with armed struggle, femicide, transsexuality, feminist theology of liberation, prostitution, illness, exile, the plurality of the Mexican identity, and the ethical commitment of art to the sociopolitical reality.”

Helena Braunstajn

 

“This is the first long non-fiction film made in the Third World showing women who have been victims of violence, but without making you pity them and without any need for help or solidarity. They don’t even need your sympathy. If anything, they offer theirs to you. This film breaks the tacit pact between filmmaker and viewer which exists in most documentaries that protest against injustice. The ones that portray wretchedness and, when they end, the viewer thinks, “Thank heavens that wasn’t me”. This is the opposite. At the end of this film you walk out saying, “I wish I was one of them”.

Jill Godmilow