This is the web version of Americanas, the EL PAÍS América newsletter in which it addresses news and ideas with a gender perspective.
If you want to subscribe, you can do so
at this link
.
In the clinical history of several women subjected to lobotomies in Colombia, you can read in the before: “Notable damage to good service”;
and “she became more docile and obedient,” in the aftermath.
This is shown by
Ana Rosa
, the latest documentary by Catalina Villar (Bogotá, 59 years old).
The film, named after her paternal grandmother, began as a family concern and ended in a shocking investigation into how female bodies that did not fit the roles of her time were subjected to bloody surgical procedures.
They wanted to take away our rebellion from women by making us look crazy.
From Paris, France, where Villar has lived for more than three decades, she says that the spark to film the documentary began nine years ago.
She arrived unexpectedly after the death of her father, when, among the man's forgotten drawers and family memories, the filmmaker found a photo of her grandmother, Ana Rosa Gaviria.
Beyond a few specific anecdotes, the life behind that photograph was a complete mystery, one that he set out to clarify.
“At that time, it wasn't a movie.
I wanted to understand why my father had made such a mistake, that he would have left a photo, an identity card in that drawer, when he had never told us about his mother.
As a filmmaker, seeing an image of his made it exist for me,” recalls Villar, who, paradoxically, decided to settle on the other side of the continent after giving up medical studies and opting for cinema.
As he asked here and there about his grandmother, why she underwent a lobotomy — a surgery that removes part of the frontal lobe of the brain — what was originally a personal question and medical curiosity became a film project with a clear focus.
It was no wonder after Villar came across a shocking fact: more than 80% of the patients who had undergone a lobotomy in the world were women.
But it was not the only thing he found in his research.
While reviewing medical records, he noticed that there were symptoms that were only recorded for them, not for them.
“As a psychiatric illness they wrote: 'she is already 33 years old and she is single', and that was never written for a man.
They did not arrive at the clinics in the same way either.
The men came because they had done something in a public place, the women because someone in their family took them,” he explains.
Perhaps as an inheritance that came to him from his uncles and cousins dedicated to psychiatry, doubt about the human mind has always been present for Villar.
This is shown in his previous works such as Maux d'enfants, mots d'adultes and
Camino
.
But here, in addition to that, there was a gender component that was difficult to ignore.
Since the director began to notice that the medical history was written in the passive when it was about them, and in the active when it was about them, Ana Rosa's case became something that went beyond a personal case.
“There I understood that the story was bigger than my grandmother and that, through her, I could tell something else and I started writing the film.”
The filmmaker visited specialists in France, clinics in the United States and consulted experts from many places around the world, before returning to her native country where the answers she was looking for were.
There she found that the situation for women and their mental health worsened when another component was added: that of class.
The history of lobotomy began with test practices on female sex workers in the United States and Portugal.
In Colombia, the bodies of the poorest women were used for psychiatric experiments such as the so-called “Asilo de Locas”.
According to the newspaper of the National University, one of the most important and oldest in the country, the women who were referred to that asylum had certain characteristics, and did not necessarily suffer from any mental illness.
Sometimes, they were just impoverished people.
“illiterate peasant women or weavers from low socioeconomic status arrived, who in some cases were considered criminals for throwing their children into the river after giving birth to them alone.
Women were admitted with postpartum depression, which at the time was associated with the imagination of madness;
and other single women who were abandoned by their families for not fulfilling the social roles of marriage, motherhood and the role of women.”
In the case of Ana Rosa, due to her social condition, they did not choose hospitalization but rather oblivion.
That was one of the biggest challenges that Villar had to face.
The director started with only a photo and a couple of vague information.
“Building a story about a person you have nothing about is a big challenge.”
She navigated it with agility, and, along that path, she encountered family secrets and mirrors of herself.
She wasn't the only one.
In the screening room, the reactions showed that the documentary filmmaker was able to sow that doubt in others and many of us could find ourselves in the descriptions of the women who were subjected to those tortures.
Archive image of newspapers with articles on the benefits of lobotomy. Courtesy: Ana Rosa Production.
Without going too far, it happened within the same film team.
Adriana Komives, Villar's editor, editor and friend, suffered severe breast cancer during production.
She died shortly after finishing the project.
“She gave a lot of herself to the film because her body was also tormented as a woman.
She had her breasts removed, which in a few years we will think is as horrible as a lobotomy,” she details.
For the filmmaker, it seems that she internalized the importance of the film and that kept it alive.
In front of and behind the camera,
Ana Rosa
is a moving work.
It shows us everything those before us endured.
The film premiered in Colombia at the Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI) in April 2023, and began a tour in Europe.
However, it did not reach the Colombian public until a few weeks ago and, according to the director,
Ana Rosa
has sparked “a liberation of the word.”
Which is no small thing in a country where mental health still remains a taboo and, at the same time, an enorama panorama in crisis.
“When people come up to me and tell me: 'I also have a schizophrenic mother, I have a brother and so I have these questions,' it makes me quite happy.”
In an interview with Americanas and throughout the film, Villar insists that he wanted his work to have an impact beyond personal chaos.
He wanted to make putting his finger on the pain of his family's pain be worth it.
“My grandmother's story is very important to me, but I would not have made a film if she was not going to represent many other women who suffered and who, in some ways, continue to suffer from similar things and dehumanizing treatments,” she says. she.
Villar managed to name and humanize, not only her paternal grandmother, but hundreds of women who were ostracized for being poor or for not adapting to the conservatism of the time.
He removed folders full of dust from oblivion and made visible the injustices they experienced and the strength they had.
For now, the documentary has left commercial cinemas but will continue for a few weeks in the Colombian cinematheque and will rotate through some festivals in France.
Villar hopes that he can be part of some platform and reach many audiences to expand the conversation about the role that psychiatry has played in perpetuating gender roles in society.
"These are questions that are current; women sometimes continue to have other types of emotional and physical burdens that make them sick or at least qualify as sick."
An objective that she achieves masterfully in her work, since it is inevitable to leave the movie theater without a doubt.
Even thinking about which of the women we know, our grandmothers or aunts suffered from it, and even if we ourselves had been candidates for a lobotomy a century ago.
Clip from the documentary Ana Rosa.Courtesy: Ana Rosa production (Courtesy: Ana Rosa Production)
Our recommendations of the week:
Thank you very much for joining us and see you next Monday!
(If you have been sent this newsletter and want to subscribe to receive it in your email,
you can do so here
).
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_