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Latin American artists against psychological violence

2021-03-01T17:52:49.053Z


Actresses and directors tell EL PAÍS episodes of psychological violence in the artistic milieu of the region, which they intend to eradicate with the birth of a network in a dozen countries


A year ago, when the pandemic started, Brazilian documentary director Luciana Sérvulo thought that the time had come for one of her most ambitious projects: a film about how the situation of women throughout Latin America was going to change during the crisis of 2020. "I started to network, but just when I started the project, I had pneumonia," Sérvulo, 54, tells El PAÍS from his home in São Paulo.

Coronavirus?

Two tests were negative.

Confused by what was happening to her body, she stopped the project while she recovered, but she also began to speak for the first time, in therapy, of a deeper wound that she carried in the body since before the pandemic.

"This was a symptom of everything that he had lived through," says Sérvulo, after recognizing himself as a victim of a type of violence that is still rarely discussed in Latin America: psychological violence.

"It was when I was invited to participate in the launch of #MeToo Brasil, as a director, that I spoke for the first time in public that I had suffered an emotionally abusive relationship," says Sérvulo, about a digital event organized last year by artists from around the world. audiovisual.

"I had no idea before the evil that silence was doing to me, how it was destroying my physical health and my emotional health."

Sérvulo has directed documentaries on various topics, from young people on the streets of São Paulo in

A Rua dos Meninos

(2005), to post-Obama Cuba in

Hijos de la Revolución

(2019).

But she says her years of work have been accompanied by constant comments from colleagues to undermine her role as a director: to delegitimize her decisions or to ignore her authority on set for being a woman in a position of power.

Comments that little by little managed to hurt her emotionally.

"I give you a classic example: when one is a director, let's say, a democratic one [who asks for the opinion of her team], that can mean in that macho world of cinema that one is a director 'who does not know what she wants," she says.

Frequent comments such as "let's see if you have experience" or "let's see if it's good."

"The patriarchal machismo system we live in is reflected on a film set," says Sérvulo.

According to a 2017 digital survey of 1,400 people who work in the audiovisual arts in Brazil, 59% of women consider that their opinions are inconsiderate in their workplace because of their sex or sexual orientation, compared to 13% of those mens.

The Brazilian director cannot yet speak about the person who hurt her the most psychologically when she was filming (she is currently evaluating with her lawyers the possibility of making her name public, but she says it is a famous singer with a long career. “There are women who they are abusers too, ”says Sérvulo).

But in 2020 he transformed his personal experience into another type of initiative: in a few months he organized

Respeito Em Cena

, Respect on the scene

in Spanish, a Latin American network of actresses and directors in 10 Latin American countries to campaign against psychological violence in the artistic field.

Film, theater or television artists who come from Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Argentina.

"The psychological violence exercised in the artistic environment has caused traumas, has left consequences and deep psychic marks on many and many artists, damaging their careers and damaging their personal and family lives," says the manifesto of this new group, which published this Monday, March 1, and signed by more than 100 people (mostly artists but also other professionals in psychology or journalism).

"All Latin American countries, without exception, are extremely macho," says Sérvulo, who began organizing this network with only 14 women, and which in a few weeks has been joined by many actresses, such as the Mexican Dolores Heredia and Joahana Murillo, the Argentine Thelma Fardin and Mirta Busnelli, or the Brazilian Cláudia Abreu and Maeve Jinkings.

“I discovered that there is hardly anyone in Brazil doing work on psychological violence.

The discourse is mainly focused on sexual violence, ”says Sérvulo.

And if it is already difficult to report sexual or physical violence to the authorities, the new network is the possibility of creating a safe space to talk about psychological violence without being branded as crazy.

"It is possible to consider that psychological violence is an instance towards other forms of violence," says sociologist Ana Safranoff, who has studied this type of violence in Argentina where, according to data from 2013 to 2018, of all women who reported attacks to the authorities, 86% were victims of psychological violence.

Maeve Jinkings, a Brazilian star of films such as

Aquarius

(2017), with whom she achieved international recognition at Cannes, was one of the first artists to join the Sérvulo initiative.

Although she is an experienced actress at 44 years old and with a broad curriculum in theater, film and television, Jinkings says she suffered psychological abuse from directors and a cast trainer.

"The latter came to slap me in the face during an exercise that was, supposedly, to release anger," he says on the phone, from Brasilia.

As with many women, the actress also suffered psychological abuse as a gateway for sexual harassment by a director.

“He's famous for swapping roles in his movies for [sexual] relationships, but I refused to play that game.

One day, he looked at me and said, 'You like yourself too much, don't you?'

I never forgot that phrase, because it is a very clear example of how things work in that type of environment ”, he recalls.

Jinkings compares this type of abuse in the artistic medium to a toxic relationship in which an intimacy and trust is built to share secrets, fears and traumas and one of the people uses this against the other at every opportunity.

"The job of the actor is to let himself go through others, but the director or coach cannot break that trust and use that vulnerability to humiliate you, especially in front of others," he says.

An invisible violence

Unlike physical violence, which leaves a visible wound, psychological violence hurts in a less obvious way: usually with frequent and humiliating comments that seek to disqualify and generate deep insecurity.

"Psychological violence aims at fundamental aspects of the human being, at damaging his image and honor," explains Carmen Lucía Díaz, a professor at the school of psychoanalysis at the National University of Colombia.

"The human being, man or woman, is made up of a physical body, its body image, a subjectivity, or dimensions of value.

Psychological violence aims to damage that image, and to damage that image is to damage that which sustains the person, that which makes them valuable to others but also to themselves ”.

Words, gestures, or screams are the weapons of this violence, but since words do not leave the same wounds as a blow, it is more difficult to identify the damage.

“As the process is not very clear, the person begins to silence it, and when he realizes, that ego is already very destroyed.

It has to do, precisely, in targeting narcissistic destruction.

Every human being must have a narcissistic element, but it is undermining like that self-love.

Because the person is so insecure, he reproaches himself for what he is, and takes responsibility for everything that is happening, ”says Díaz.

Safranoff, the Argentine sociologist, has studied that women in more vulnerable conditions are more likely to be victims of this type of violence, but she also outlines a theory to explain why women with more visibility or power –as actresses or film directors– can be compromised.

"The patriarchal order that is based on male domination is threatened when women have more resources," says Safranoff.

“Violence is used to restore the traditional system of subordination of women.

In the field of audiovisual arts, perhaps this may be playing a relevant role, while men could be “threatened” by the fame / public role of women and psychological violence emerges as the way to “restore” their power. ", Explain.

A Latin American wound in front of the public

Documentary filmmaker Luciana Sérvulo directs a new campaign against psychological violence in Latin America PHOTO: COURTESY / VIDEO: Colectivo Respeito Em Cena

The raw material with which the actresses work is their body, their voice, and the empathy to appropriate a new role.

For this reason, several of the actresses of this new Latin American network against psychological violence mentioned the recurrent attacks on their bodies as the focus of the attacks they have suffered.

"The truth is I was always a pretty sleepy young woman, blind to these violence, because for me being an actress was a joy, until certain things happened and I began to question myself," says Camila Selser, a 35-year-old Nicaraguan actress who from a very young age decided to enter the world of Mexican television and has worked for Televisa soap operas such as

Te Doy la Vida

(2020), and series such as

Sr. Ávila

(2013-2018, from HBO) or

Soy tu fan

(2011, produced by Gael García and Diego Luna, among others).

"The casting director of a well-known company told me 'if you don't lose weight, we are going to take you out of the novel, so get on your feet.'

On another occasion an assistant director told me 'you would have been given that role but you don't have boobs' ", says Selser" And on another occasion one of the actors told me 'you quietly look prettier'.

Obviously at that moment I felt like pulling out a knife and killing him, but I didn't dare because he is a friend of the director, and they are both famous ”.

Selser clarifies that she has received dozens of comments of that style during her career, about her body and her character, and that for a while they did manage to change the image she had of herself.

"It is constant, that drill, that hammer, that you are not enough, you better shut up," recalls the actress.

“I was a young girl who took everything they told me to be true: yes I am fat, yes I talk too much, yes I am the one who does not have chichis (breasts) but she is a good actress.

I have never been enough for the industry ”.

On the opposite corner of the continent, from Chile, the theater actress and activist Andrea Gutiérrez says that she could not have survived in the world of television because of that same violent control of the body.

"It is an area that I find beautiful, but it is super cruel, you have to have super tough skin," says Gutiérrez, former president of the Chilean actors' union, who wrote a thesis last year on gender violence against actresses and writers.

In his master's research, Gutierrez found that "power relations are fertile ground for psychological violence" and that directors and producers are very often those who exercise this type of violence against actresses.

But in addition to control over the body, there are other common ways to attack them, such as constantly flagging them as troublesome.

"Although my research says that actresses have a more professional deployment than men, in the cinema or theater, they are branded as crazy, or hysterical, or problematic," explains Gutierrez.

He also found examples in which theater actresses were required to take care of cleaning the rooms, or cleaning the cups of their companions, to return them to the domestic roles to which the feminine is associated.

And even, Gutierrez explains, he found cases in which the motherhood of women is controlled.

"Many comments from superiors that refer to motherhood as something that limits the careers of actresses, which is impossible to reconcile, because their body is going to be deformed and no one is going to call them again."

In the center of the continent, in Nicaragua, the women's network was also joined by Gloria Carrión, director of a successful documentary last year called

Heredera del Viento

.

Actresses "are much more exposed than we directors," admits Carrión.

“In my case, I have experienced moral, sexist violence, to undermine someone's authority.

It is not the same as what female actresses are exposed to as they expose their body, their emotions in front of the camera ”.

Like Luciana Sérvulo in Brazil, as director in Nicaragua Carrión has also found herself faced with the dilemma of being in a position of power but with colleagues reluctant to recognize them as leaders: on two occasions, she recalls, “my ability to lead was questioned. , or my authority on set is questioned, and that is due to being a woman ”.

But even so, he considers that more than focusing on specific cases, the new network may have a dissemination role that no other network of Latin American actresses has had until now, and that it may respond differently to the concerns raised by #MeToo of the United States in 2017, giving a more central space to psychological violence and not only to physical or sexual violence.

"This is the first time that I have seen a serious effort at the Latin American level," says Gutiérrez optimistically.

"I was excited to add my voice to this in order to motivate other women in the union to raise their voices, if they have complaints to make, and transform these spaces."

Source: elparis

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