Social Film and Visual discourse.

First Part


LUCKY 13 There is no love without tragedy
Essay by David Caneva Akle. First part.

If to regain what was lost
I had to first lose what I had
If to accomplish a goal
I had to endure pain

If in order to be in love
it was necessary to have been hurt
I have then suffered enough
I have then shed my share of tears

Because after all, I have realized
that we don't enjoy it as much
until after we have suffered first

Because after all, I have understood
That what the tree has for blossoms
lives from what it has buried

Soneto - Sonnet
Francisco Luis Bernardez

Taking into account different theories and approaches to the filmic, personal
experiences and a lively interaction with the subjects while absorbing and
assimilating each advice from people that is immersed in the documentary
world, it is possible to have a reflection or at least an approach to the aims of
this essay regarding the film Lucky 13. This is the final film of a trilogy were
women and immigrant issues are linked through arts and social experiences of
the subjects. The present is also a final support document where the director
David Caneva Akle links his two previous visual pieces: Immigrant of
Expression and The Warrior (2009).

The universe of the discourse and a more formal approach will be taken into
consideration as backbones of the present essay regarding Lucky 13. On the
one hand, issues such as the relationship between the authors perceptions of
the filmic and the notion of the feminine setting free from the dominant
discourse in which it has been traditionally immersed will be discussed. The
latter perspective of the feminine adopted by him and seen through various
authors will determine what has been called the universe of the discourse. In
this universe, the feminine is portrayed as vital to maintain and shape the idea
of a film where female subjects, but also directors, are not subordinated to the
dominant concept of the woman as a sexual object, diva or as the model of
institutional representation
1
. The film is a text, a space of the creation of mutual
significations where it is allowed to discover the female subjects and not their
phallic but social approach to film narratives, with love, tragedy, sexuality and
the vision of society as a whole and not as a defined lecture of the image
industry establishment. On the other hand, a formal approach to the concept of
the film, its evolution, and its process, is also a part of the main assessments of
this discussion. At some points both universes will be intertwined being the
feminine what holds them together- as the author conceives the film as a
projection of both aesthetic and critical concerns.

In a simple way, an art object, in this case the documentary in question, is a
kind of approach to normal life. It is the interaction with practice, narratives,
mass media discourse and dominant approaches that regular sequences of
situations in which some narratives and fragments were dropped are evaluated
and that a film is discovered within a given process.

In the same order of ideas and analysis, which is part of the academic and
scientific process inside the investigations about films, authors and
interpretations -a natural subjective vision of the film and the creative process to
obtain it-, are mediated by the addition of the concepts of who we are filming
and why. The decision to make films where a portraiture nature is dominating
over a natural approach to the journalistic style is the difference between an art
piece and the massive production of images as an advert. This evolution is
revealed within the process of rediscovering a film and a exploited TV show in
which the main aim is the economic and the ideological, both part of the
cinematographic apparel exploitation of the humans feelings and
preoccupations.

On one hand, last

century evolution looks like a portrait of different fragments of
our humanity preoccupations towards the perception of success and recognition

1
Millan, Margara. Derivas de un cine en femenino, (1999). The Model of institutional representation, (MRI)
by its Spanish initials, is defined as the classic film produced by Hollywood during the 40s decade,
because it is there where a strong model impacts the social modern imagination. For others, it is the
commercial film, the series, that have had lost singularity to be converted in pure entertainment.
Social Film and Visual discourse. First Part

of our modernity. On the other hand, we have the unrepresented, the
unsuccessfulness, and our barbarisms and failures as a group of humans.

To join those fragments it is necessary to interpret what the portrait author (i.e.
the creator behind the object) believes and find out how the subject is intended
to be reproduced and recognised, whether if it is success and recognition, or
failure, tragedy and loneliness. (Zeldin, 2009)
2


However, there is a permanent relationship between these preoccupations
established by the civilization of image, wherein the visual cultural
predominance, in the modern western world, turn our individual fragments as
collective ones. Those exchangeable relations are born when they are
necessary to create a global historical approach to the local stories that art, as a
general meaning, produces. Yet, artists are exposed and reflected, rather than
related into its subjects when the genuine questions should be what is that thing
that is the most valuable? What does our globality represent? and, does the
exploration of a non-critic and homogeneous world the world where we are
used to stand- is the right one?

To know or film something about the small culture that surrounds us, whilst
living that big space of ideas, is like taking a breath of incoherence in the logical
discourse; it is to make from a piece, a public act with repercussions and
longevity, something that will last but that is still part of the artist world. In
addition, during this discourse interaction and social integration we, subject,
object, directors, spectators, learn everything yet discover anything. Each thing
is in time and space as an eternal unit where creation takes place, but it is
subject to analysis, critic and deconstruction. Firstly, there are our constant
approaches as humans, but as artists, we are polarized by different questions
that define our own critic crisis. Why must people listen, read or watch your
films, books or music?, is there an imagery recognition to actually represent a
spectator or for a spectator to feel identified with? Nevertheless, images are

2
Taken from the lecture Portraiture and intimacy with Theodore Zeldin in the National Portrait Gallery.
April 2009. Zeldin is an English philosopher, sociologist, historian, writer and public speaker. Probably
most famous internationally as the author of An Intimate History of Humanity (1994), a book which probes
the personal preoccupations of people in many different civilisations, both in the past and in the present.
composed by various systems and fragments and there is no reason to think
the whole unit of the image can be covered by a specific and unique code. A
film has its own shapes, but it also integrates in its discourse exterior signs of
different kinds. They belong to other artistic and specific languages, like the
narrative, the dramatic construction, the images plastic composition, the colour
relations inside the frame, the music, different things linked to the light, the
expressive effects of photography, the fashion systems, the design and the
decoration, the acting moment, the variety of expressions and socialized
attitudes where daily communications relay and that relate us with our
conversation codes, mimics, gestures, etc. Yet, then we need to add the
cinematographic aspect: procedures, camera movements, size and time
relations of the scenes, organization of narrative units, montage images and
sound relations. At the end, cinematographic language is the composition of the
filmic and the filmed.

Both of them, the filmic and the filmed, have to be linked in such a way that
allows the main subject to fully develop and stand for him/herself. Some films
show us strong characters; they can be like a breath of fresh air in a polluted
world or a drink of poison in a magical life in which we succumb within the
process of creation.

There is a moment when someone takes the picture and a human, not an
object, is revealed. The same sensation of breathing is present when the
director discovers that the film is already there before anyone even noticed. As
soon as the author portrays images, some things about the humanity of the
subject are going to be revealed as a breakthrough, but indeed, everything will
also be about the author. Essentially, it is a mutual relationship, a two-way
interaction with a degree of reserve, where the author is secondary or a mere
spectator.

In Christian Metz words, the filmic field explores different dominant discourses,
the culture, and genre in a symbiotic activity that produces significances in film
languages and messages or transference codes. He is one of the authors from
the semiotic movement that find in the linguistic structure an explanation field to
Social Film and Visual discourse. First Part

different human activities, in terms of significant activities, of course, being film
one very significant. Seen from this point of view, the filmic field exploration will
bump into fragments, discourses and significances that were broken during the
film process. That exploration is a reward, as the author does not have special
messages during the process and the final cut of a documentary, since
messages come from the subjects, men or women, and hopefully they will
contribute and offer themselves up. In this way, the director is a mere observer
of the process who by adopting a distance allows the character to emerge and
constitute him/herself from all the fragments and significances. During this
phase, the director shoots and photographs. If there is beauty, ugliness,
obscenity or purity, it will not be seen until much later; he or she will discover
what he or she has been unaware of until a given moment. The role of the
director in this moment is that of recognising when there is a fragment with
potential.

In addition, new codes of interaction with the film world severally affect what the
author thinks others feel about a visual piece, but also about human reactions,
language, pain and tragedy. All these explorations of the filmic, the film, the
subjects and the genre were based and marked as important topics to develop
after the study made by the author of the present essay of Gary Tharns film,
Black Sun (2005)
3
, focusing on the ideas that the others in front of us are
humans rather than celebrities. It was also an influence to stop megalomaniac
tendencies that naturally nourished the creation process of Lucky 13, by
letting the author see through the disabled character of Tharns film different
points of view, and deeply understand how some people with physical
limitations and an attached tragedy, survived and still bring happiness to each
person and moments surrounding them.

This film Black Sun, with its effects and animations pushed the author of Lucky
13 to think about the parallel between what we think is reality and what others
think about reality. The random use of images of people sharing spaces but
without looking their eyes, juxtapositions of voices and images that evoke

3
Winner of many international awards tells the story of Huges de Montamlambert, a French artist and
filmmaker living in New York who got blind during a violent assault in 1978.
something led to shape dramatic circumstances were people is not aware of the
importance of being alive, breathing and helping others. In the same order of
ideas but from the filmmakers perception, there is an important value to rescue
and to be critical about, which is capturing images and sounds of others, this
means the author is part of their intimacy, an intimacy that the camera and the
filmmaker is constantly breaking.

However, if there is a permanent disruption of that intimate areas, the subject,
the filmic and the filmmakers points of view are subordinated to a general
shape of our cultural representations, cultural repetitions where we are more
often adapted to the idea that you need to believe what you see, conceiving
some attitudes as facts that developed in non-objective conditions and
perceptions of human beings. Our film culture is now more about consumerism,
instead of something, which leads the audience to think about our sense and
our projections of what art is. Films apparently have succumbed into arguments,
which we just sit to watch as complete tales with happy endings, rather than to
interpret values and codes from society on cinema.

Nevertheless, free and voluntarily, documentaries have also adapted to the idea
that films are icon-idols and everything apart from the spectacular is boring.
Without exciting scenes with guns and romantic clichs, seems as if films are
set just to maintain a big market of deaf, blind and mute paranoid spectators,
fed by a massive bombing of images of what is good or bad, of what the
general code says, or of what the classic narrative proposes.

The model of institutional representation that this essay has been exposing is
also represented in the sexual and genre interaction. Traditionally, the
questions derived from the critic to classic films and its textual mechanisms of
image construction, characterised patterns that reflect womens position in the
interior of a patriarchal unconsciousness. In this same order of ideas, this
representation model denotes a merchant character of the film piece with formal
characteristics or conventions that the representation produces and repeats,
creating significations, like for example, making a woman part of the narrative
structure. On the other hand, we can suppose that films, which do not portray
Social Film and Visual discourse. First Part

women as a sexual object, have different characteristics, discourses and
representations that differ from the cultural dominion. Firstly, the reflections
about community-individual, the self-questioning, their own identity search
against or opposed to what the symbolic order established. Secondly, feminist
films and some of the films made by women, and so other movements, like gay,
black or Latin, share with the vanguard film or with the countercultural film,
experimental or artistic, the seal to crossover the habitual ways of
cinematography representation, looking forward to find the diverse, interested in
showing subjects closer to the natural or supernatural experiences, in
contradiction to the stereotypes that the film and documentary industry produce.

In addition, the feminine -not feminist- reflection that the author intends to link in
the film and to support in this essay, is not only to discover some elements from
the dominant point of view, but to realise how can a male director talk or intend
an approach to films were women struggles are a permanent source of topics
and subjects. As a documentary maker is good to understand if the film copes
with some pleasures or answers questions to the public about the feminine
world even if they are part of the model of institutional representation or if they
are following other paths of knowledge and dissertation. A formal approach to
what these ways of thinking mean is part of a discovery not related to feminism,
but to women in a state of art and work revolution.

Lucky 13, the film that follows this essay, is the complete spin of a trilogy were
female subjects predominate. Three artists, three struggles, three Latin women
in a common place with different migrant backgrounds in the United Kingdom.

These visual pieces are fields of broken colour, sounds and narratives, without
any figurative reference points at all. There is nothing in these works for the
viewer to respond to except for visual impressions. This is the hue and
luminosity of the film itself, the subject and the dominant perception of a woman
whether if it is sexual or miserable.

Yet, these feminine perceptions are also part of a general sensation in the films,
which is the human struggle, happiness, honour, dignity or abstract words that
sometimes arts afford to turn into concrete actions and that not only relate
women around the world, but groups of people that have been diminish under
the film laws and masculine narratives. Some natural existential fights are part
of the act of being and are created from the scratch, were nobody wants to dig,
where the industry does not want to look and give founding. At the beginning of
this essay there is a poem of Francisco Luis Bernard, the Uruguayan poet
whose life was marked by tragedy and struggles, explaining in a deep
description what this essay and documentary artwork mean in general for the
director and the internal feelings that provoke the following and filming of this
third visual piece about the subject who is an immigrant that left her homeland
looking for her biological mother residing in London.

Another inspiration materialized in front of the directors eyes as he was
excavating sensuality and women when Nobuyoshi Araki
4
photographys
compilation appeared adding more messy thoughts about genre relations,
sensuality and sexuality. Araki is like a forbidden fruit, and for the director, the
perfect excuse to understand sexuality, tragedy, the contradiction, the erotic
and the feminism.

Arakis definition of visual pieces is like Lucky 13 in terms that the film is
waiting for its subjects to give of themselves, offer themselves up to us.
However, this was a point of argumentation with the some other filmmakers and
feedbacks because the journalistic style is not contemplated in the film world at
all, or at least, it is not well seen, or maybe the director did not know how to do
it, but for the author it is necessary to portrait reality as it is, like when she is
explaining how she was recovering her life after an almost mortal accident with
a bin lorry in the spot were everything happened. In addition, the subject made
a big effort when she was asked to walk again over the same steps. As for the
filmmaker, to push forward the situation trying to find tragedy. This endeavour,

4
Araki Nobuyoshi. Araki by Araki. Taschen. 2009. Japanese photographer and contemporary artist. He is
also known by the nickname Ar!k" (?). The book of reference for this essay is the compilation
of his last 30 years as the most prolific artists alive or dead in Japan and around the world. Many of his
photographs are erotic; some have been called pornographic. Some of his most popular photography
books are Sentimental Journey, Tokyo Lucky Hole, and Shino.
Social Film and Visual discourse. First Part

nonetheless, is related to the formal approach subsequently in this writing-
since it is part of the procedure used during the filming.


Johanna, who is a passionate soul with a contagious energy and a definite
sense for social commitment appeared during a gig in central London, laughing
with a group of friends. The stunning amazing blond woman with a walk stick
approached the director of the band and said: Where are you going so fast?
Instantly, the subject hooked the attention of the room; everybody was in love
with her. From this moment on, the filming starts with her evidently realizing that
something very sad happened to this woman years ago. First, she recovered
from a tragedy with a strong determination which has been tested over
burdensome circumstances managing to rise above- like being run over by a
bin lorry, or not knowing her mother until her 20's- yet, she personifies a great
spirit, inspiring others throughout her poetry. Second, progressively the
fragments of her intimacy were slightly revealed. During the discovery journey
of Johanna the approach to her life was purely passionate, observational and
linked to anachronic ideas, that not everybody could be happy about or at least
a little bit comfortable with in life. Moreover, the director was trapped in between
the decision to produce a film about her or a film about her accident around
central London.

A fearless contradiction of what a strong soul is when she is telling us what the
witnesses said when they saw a rag doll smashed by the wheels of a truck.
Firstly, the idea of reminding every circumstance that developed in a tragedy as
a piece of a big labyrinth where future and past are marked by a permanent
present is enough as topic of research and argumentation for a documentary,
and sometimes some situations push us to do something in ways that we do not
expect. The diary notes during the shooting, clearly showed that tales about
cyclists are permanent and painful. Even if the first story was not about an
accident, it was linked with the idea of a cyclist. Luis, The rickshaw, the
subject that was supposed to be filmed five moths ago, is in prison now in a
case that requires more research and permissions before going into deep film
analysis; it is also the tale of a cyclist in the city. Nevertheless, those days
different shootings that the director was doing for the previous two short films,
and that were never used, were fundamental to produce and film this final one,
as the main subject, Johanna, was permanently with the director.

Johanna was there, unaware of the filming process, but at the same time was
open and collaborative during the film sessions. Following her histrionic
personality for a nine-month period, her family ties, and her immediate past, -
related to the group of people that was being filmed, but that she left just before
the accident happened-, is a long journey of misinterpretations, collaborations,
friendship, discussion and analysis about life and life in films. In that order of
circumstances, one important and interesting thing happened when she was
introduced to Diana Garcia, the subject from the first film of the directors earlier
Immigrant of Expression (2009)
5
. While they were speaking about Dianas
work and Johannas life, they realised that both were members of New
generation, a Latin artist collective based in Vauxhall, precisely the place were
the director had been filming for a year. In some way, they were sharing the
same codes and expressions as a male spectator filmed them with no
interference over the situation. The circumstances became even better, when it
was decided to film Laura, subject of the second film The Warrior (2009)
6
, but
at that stage, Laura disagreed with the person who was supposed to introduce
the film crew, as she dislikes journalists searching for yellowish stories the
filmmaker was told.

A week after this response from this second subject of interest, Johanna took
the director to a small office in which an International Refugee Migrant
Organization (IRMO) is based and suddenly inside the office Johanna says
hello to a red haired woman as they were not seeing each other for a while. The
other woman was Laura.


5
Immigrant of Expression. Dir. David Caneva Akle. 2009.The film is an intimate journey through Diana
Garcia !s life (a Colombian immigrant in the UK), reveals that work by helping others she can have
personal rewards.
6
The Warrior. Dir. David Caneva Akle. 2009. The film is about "Laura" who ran away from an imminent
threat of death. Today after 20 years, with a small camera in Heatrow Airport, she realises how the world
has changed.

Social Film and Visual discourse. First Part

Then the director realised that both characters, Johanna and Laura but also
Diana, were very important and interesting in their communities and indeed as
subjects of a Documentary Portrait as well. This evocative situation is the
example of what the director believes is a real following of a subject and how
three different stories can be linked in a document of life to shape some
editorial decisions taken during a film process. In this case the script is based in
suppositions of what its seen from the subjects and their way of life, rather than
a rigid narrative with beginning and end, starring and co-starring. In addition,
this discovery dropped an imminent parallel between the theory and the
abstract concept of what an artistic experimental documentary is.

An urgent necessity of the use of colour arose and was now closer to what the
directors perception of feminism could be in a film. The three elements: film,
colour and feminism, suddenly clicked at a moment when Laura accepted to be
filmed. Subsequently, the tight tie between them was found, as well as the link
among the arts and the final film subject, the junction between the exploration of
the unknown, and between the technique and the theory.

The reserved definition of feminist film changed tremendously while shooting. In
general thinking about a feminist film, there is a contradictory point when its
believed that it is a society of women; although, its been mistaken all along with
the terminology. Nonetheless, after these films, it has become evident what it
really means. To begin with, it means someone who believes in being treated
with equality and vice versa; believing in being humanitarian and trading
fairness among all regardless of gender difference. It means feminist film can
include men or women, subjects, actors, and directors. Secondly, this film has
taught that discriminating women based on their gender role or discriminating
Latin or western or black people is not going to solve the gender and social
issues, rather, we all have to work together to create a stable and fair society.
All these arguments are also based on previous research about the definition of
the feminist film, shaped by different thesis of feminist filmmakers that include
Gurinder Chadha, Jane Champion, Laura Mulvey, and Sally Potter because
their work illustrate the fairness and equality, both in movies and
documentaries, and because they portray the stories of reality. Another
important element to choose them was their belief in being humanitarian.

This academic researchers and filmmakers related to the feminist world are
not just part of a capricious exploration of the director to back up the theory
about a film for or with women, done by men or by women, they are part of a
long research that the author has been doing since he realised that women
were part of constant life, a constant psychoanalysis of representations and
codes inside the film culture where the women is in fact the narrative, the
subject and the final meaning of the dominant culture of image. In this order of
ideas, Laura Mulvey -who was also quoted in a previous essay by the author
and is a permanent source for investigation-, deconstructs this way of seeing
women in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
7
.

Mulvey's article engaged in no empirical research on film audiences, instead,
she stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and
then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of
classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject
position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In the
era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the
protagonist of the film, who tended to be a man. Meanwhile, Hollywood female
characters of the 1950s and 60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-
looked-at-ness." Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the
male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and
"fetishist" (i.e. seeing women as 'Madonnas').

Mulvey argued that the only way to annihilate the "patriarchal" Hollywood
system was to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical
Hollywood with alternative feminist methods. She called for a new feminist

7
Mulvey Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in: Screen Magazzine. Screen No 16.3 Autumn
1975 pp. 6-18. In the paper, Mulvey calls for a destruction of modern film structure as the only way to free
women from their sexual objectification in film, arguing for a removal of the voyeurism encoded into film by
creating distance between the male spectator and the female character. The only way to do so, Mulvey
argues, is by destroying the element of voyeurism and "the invisible guest". Mulvey also asserts that the
dominance that men embody is only so because women exist, as without a woman for comparison, a man
and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. For Mulvey, it is the presence of
the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.
Social Film and Visual discourse. First Part

avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the magic and pleasure of classical
Hollywood filmmaking. She wrote, "It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty
annihilates it."

Some feminists criticized "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," like if she
were denying the existence of lesbian women, gay men, heterosexual women,
and those outside these identities. For the director of Lucky 13, those
identities are also reflected in the film, when analysing pleasure or beauty, as
well as when analysing pain and tragedy as permanent contradictions. Thus,
these contradictions are an awakening to what the film process, the methods
and the storytelling are. Moreover, these dissertations about feminism,
discontinuity, post modernism, made the process of reflecting the contradictions
of arts hard for the filmmaker, in terms of voyeurisms and fetishisms, lacking of
modes and codes, and disruption of style. The author tried shaping an
approach for that discontinuity of the narratives, as an alternative way to say
that he is not interested in the spectator but in the films creative result as a an
incoherent rant with a passionate voice of the difference.


Directors not always know where they are going and documentaries ideas and
directions are constantly changing, for this reason, it is not essential to
contextualise some situations by providing the audience with information about
the past of the subject, this is the reason why she is still thinking and working in
present time, and the director followed certain behaviours to show that eternal
present. The film is also trying to capture that essence in fragments that build a
story from different perspectives, in reverse, upside down, showing a feminine
outline of the natural struggles and the many twist of the films narrative. The
director made the choice not to film her family and past relationships, but her
beliefs and thoughts about relationship dynamics, equality, literature and poetry.

Therefore, the constant quotations and discussions about poetry relay on the
natural access that the subject has with poetry and recitation. The director
realised that the different footages obtained during the filming process at some
point needed to be visually organized and put together in such a way that the
tragedy and determination of a great spirit could be conveyed with a sensation
of a hallucinatory state of mind where the surreal is converted into real.

Normally, the director is not too aware of this process because he is used to
shoot everything in an observational style, but during the pre production stage,
after trying to break the news method where interviews were conducted whilst
people sat down in armchairs, the subject was taken out of the home
environment and it seemed to be a lot easier to film in terms of an observational
style, however still using the journalistic point of view which was radically
condemned and put into questions.

Then a singular approach to the film was revealed as the subject also pushed
the daily interaction subtly giving some new clues of her life in a very fragile and
honest pose of her intimacy. The fact that the subject is from a generation were
women are successful in terms of profession, motherhood and leadership,
made it possible to show how domination roles are turning, revealing a new
female subject. The director believes that the suitable style was found during
this interaction and through the possibility of entering her physical environment
and very intimate moments during the night. However, the subsequent
discussions and edition method dropped a new version of the film, apparently
lacking timeline or story and were the subject was not at all described to the
spectators, but indeed, that was one of the breaking points.

During the edition process, all these different faces were showed because of
the editing style, but the visual piece was strong enough with the content of the
film. After a rough-cut screening, it became obvious that the entire structure of
the film needed to be changed. Furthermore, it was necessary to adapt the
editing style to the way the film it was shoot. Therefore, it had to be slower and
it had to challenge the audience more. Through the filmmakers advices, the
film was encouraged to leave the audience a bit more in the dark and to have a
more mysterious way of telling the story.

Social Film and Visual discourse. First Part

Then it was understood that it is important to think of story telling elements. This
meant, for example, to make a past story interesting, accessible and relevant
now, even if the director thinks is not necessary at all.

Then, during edition and supported by some styles, the definite approach for
the documentary was that of a suspense film, leaving the audience to discover
what had happened to her and why her determination was actually interesting.
But then, that idea of taking the audience on a journey to discover in which
context it occurred and why she became a victim, seemed obsolete and so
obvious that the romantic, evocative and delicate ingredients of the visual
document were lost.

Another element that was also found during the process was the music that the
subject and director were listening to during all these months, which in fact
derives in a folklore approach to her Caribbean environment and how tragic it is
sometimes and, at the same time, so joyful and pleasant for the audience. The
uses of Cumbia rhythms evoke the necessity of belonging and attachment to
personal roots.

Besides music, all the existential fights of the subject and the artist dilemmas
are also united by poetry with some sentences that the director found when he
first arrived to the place where the subject was reciting and that the filmmaker
was expecting to deconstruct to develop a natural approach to the films
narrative. The aim was to build from the verses a suffered joy of techniques,
dialogues and a nonsense repetition of colours and sounds. That is what the
director found within the process of this film production in addition to the
passion for women and immigrants, films and music.