Three feature docs are selected for Venice Critics Week, one of which, Malqueridas by Tana Gilbert (Chile/Germany) is the only documentary selected for Competition. Andres Peyrot’s God Is a Woman (France, Switzerland, Panama) will open the section while the Italian doc Passione critica by Simone Isola, Franco Montini, Patrizia Pistagnesi gets a Special Screening.
Directed by Tana Gilbert and produced by Paola Castillo, Malqueridas, sold by Square Eyes, portrays the daily life of a group of mothers in Chile who have been deprived of their freedom. Their children grow up far from them but remain in their hearts. Behind bars, they find affection in other inmates who share the same situation. The mutual support among these women becomes a powerful form of resistance against a system that incarcerates poverty.
“Malqueridas constructs the women’s stories through images captured by cell phones inside the prison, recovering the collective memory of an abandoned community. It creates a shared sense of affection expressed through the story of Karina, the film’s voice, who was deprived of her freedom for more than six years. This voice was created from extensive conversations that the filmmakers held with more than twenty women and reinterpreted based on Karina’s own experience,” read the production notes.
Malqueridas will compete for the IWONDERFULL Grand Prize of €5000; the Film Club Audience Prize (€3000); the Verona Film Club Award, bestowed by a jury composed of the under-35 members of the Verona Film Club and awarded to the most innovative film in the section and the Mario Serandrei – Hotel Saturnia Award for Best Technical Contribution, given by a committee of film critics. Together with the feature debuts across all Venice 2023 sections, Malqueridas is also eligible for the Lion of the Future – ‘Luigi De Laurentiis’ Venice Award for a Debut Film.
The opening film of Venice Critics Week is God Is A Woman, directed by Andres Peyrot and sold by Pyramide International. The synopsis reads how, in 1975, French Oscar-winning director Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau travelled to Panama to film the Kuna community, where women are sacred. Gaisseau, his wife and their little girl Akiko lived with the Kunas for a year. The project eventually ran out of funds and a bank confiscated the reels. Fifty years later, the Kunas are still waiting to discover “their” film, now a legend passed down from the elders to the new generation. One day, a hidden copy is found in Paris…
The Italian doc Passione critica by Simone Isola, Franco Montini, Patrizia Pistagnesi gets a Special Screening. The synopsis reads how: “Passione critica investigates the relationship between authors and critics throughout the history of Italian cinema, following the evolution of the Union of Italian Film Critics since its establishment in 1971. An exploration of a kind of secondary history in Italian culture, outlined through interviews with eminent personalities and intermixed with archive footage from the 1960s to the advent of the internet and social media to the current explosion of audiovisual devices, challenging the very definition of the boundaries of cinema.”
