Mabel Lozano was able to shine a powerful light on the darker face of prostitution in El pimp , and today she does it again with Biography of the corpse of a woman . On that occasion, in 2018, we were seated before a man who was crudely recognizing how women brought from Latin America come to last three years of useful life: one with a certain energy and naivete because they remain convinced that they will achieve roles, another with disappointment and drugs to endure, and a third with despair and violent punishments until they are practically useless, withdraw them from the premises and offer them to third-party brothels as minor merchandise. And this time, in this documentary that breaks through the constrictions of the pandemic, it places us before the boy who witnessed the murder of his own mother, Yamiled Giraldo, shot in a Navarrese town in 2009 despite his status as a protected witness after managing to put his sexual exploiter in jail.
"The most difficult thing is that I was not able to stay by his side, and I will never forget that," cries Yamiled's son. “I was so scared that I had to jump over the wall and ask for help. There my heart broke into a thousand pieces, my soul left and most of my life left, and that is unforgivable. ”
The heart that was then a boy's and today is broken as a young man was broken, and it breaks when we see it, because that murder of assassins was not in remote places, but in Spain. "We believe that these things do not happen here, but they do," says Lozano. “Since 2000, 44 women in prostitution have been murdered; nameless women, second-rate deaths, who don't even enter gender violence statistics. Their names disappear. Their children have nothing. "
Mabel Lozano (Villaluenga de la Sagra, Toledo, 1967) has been a thousand things in life, but today she is a writer and film director with a cause: that of the fight against trafficking in women, a flag that has made her a benchmark for an issue that we prefer not to look at.
"If we talk about kidneys, everyone understands it: no one can profit from the kidneys. And yet there are people profiting from the body and sexual exploitation of immigrant women in social exclusion and nothing happens. You have to typify all the faces of pimping, "she says. "And a comprehensive law against trafficking is necessary."
Yamiled Giraldo, the Colombian woman who starred posthumously in her documentary, had arrived in Spain in 2001 for an alleged job in a silk factory. She was picked up at the Irún airport and was already raped in the car that moved her. She was then transferred to a club where she was prostituted. After escaping, she denounced and jailed her pimp, who later commissioned her murder. The crime and trial had been reported in the press, but Lozano made the leap to Navarra and stood in front of the house where the widower, Navarro, and Yamiled's four children (the two who arrived from Colombia and the two girls who both had in common): "The husband did not want to speak in any way, but the son who had witnessed the crime did want to participate: he wanted to pay tribute to his mother," she says.
A sequence from the filming of the documentary 'Biography of the corpse of a woman', which reproduces how Yamiled Giraldo was murdered. In video, the trailer.
The result is Biography of the Corpse of a Woman , a title he chose "because it contains the idea of life and death." Of the 44 murdered since 2000, says Lozano, 32 were murdered by their prostitution consumers, 8 by their pimps, 3 by brothel owners, one remains unsolved and the other is missing. Three were protected witnesses. “We never hear their voices, they are silenced and when they denounce how Yamiled they are killed. My documentary is a tribute to everyone, to their children, to their families. ” From this documentary, at least one spotlight illuminates them.
