In conversation with the devastating prose writer Fernanda Melchor for Granta, her English translator Sophie Hughes recalls a few lines from Bong Joon-ho that she feels encapsulate the essence of Melchor’s novel Hurricane Season: "… who can point their finger at a struggling family, locked in a fight for survival, and call them parasites? It’s not that they were parasites from the start. They are our neighbours, friends, and colleagues who have merely been pushed to the edge of the precipice." Melchor’s writing, as anyone familiar with her work will attest, is not for the faint of heart; steeped in the pervasive poverty of rural Mexico within fictionalised versions of the area where she was born and raised; she comprehends the desperation that drives people to extreme actions, with the rigour of as an analyst.
If Melchor’s writing takes us to the precipice of human despair, Chilean filmmaker Tana Gilbert pushes us over that edge and into the aftermath, into the harsh reality of punishment and imprisonment – and the deeper marginalisation from society that follows. Her hauntingly beautiful debut documentary, Malqueridas, brings us behind the walls of one of Santiago’s largest high-security female detention centres. It is comprised entirely of photographs and videos taken on contraband mobile phones by women serving lengthy sentences who collaborated with Gilbert across the six-year-making process. The filmmaker interviewed over twenty women, identifying recurring moments and themes in their testimonies and integrating them into a narrative performed by formed by inmate Karina Sánchez, whose voice becomes a conduit for a collective experience within the prison.
still courtesy of FicciFestival
In Chile, 91% of incarcerated women are mothers. Often, they are the primary caregivers and breadwinners of their families. Like in the UK, new mothers are able to keep their babies with them until the age of two. After this point, the children must leave the prison to live with relatives or other caregivers while their mothers transition into the general prison population. The film begins by taking us into the Mother and Baby Unit of the Santiago Women’s Penitentiary Centre. We start in pitch blackness, with only sound to guide us – a car rolling over gravel, the murmur of guards, their walkie-talkies emitting faint electronic beeps. A baby cries, and a mother’s voice calms it. Slowly, out of the darkness emerges the faint outline of a photograph, which, as it comes into view, depicts a very young woman, who can’t be much older than a teenager, holding her newborn baby.
The image, much like the 32,640 others, is grainy and shot vertically. It reflects the difficult conditions of filming within the prison and the inherent risk and rebellion of bringing together these stories. The experience of the woman chained to a bed while giving birth, the woman whose young son is so attuned to the sound of the guard’s keys jingling he anticipates being locked up each day, all the women whose mothering carries on digitally, and the devastating realisation that one woman’s son on the outside has been killed. The film does not share details of the crimes that the women are accused of, yet the backdrop of systemic poverty, which it is set against, is implicit. Most women incarcerated in Chile are charged with non-violent offences, often rooted in survival-driven involvement in the lower levels of the developing drug economy. No moment illustrates more powerfully the sentiment that these women are our neighbours, friends, and colleagues caught up in the same complex socioeconomic pressures, than when a guard helps one inmate video call her children, who live on the same street as him.
But it is the moment of the young mother illuminated, which, to me, encapsulates the mutual aid of this project. It is a moment that draws attention to the intentionality of the editing process, which involved reprinting each image frame-by-frame. A decision which gives permanence and physical weight to fleeting moments captured on devices that could have been confiscated at any time. By doing so, Gilbert and Paola Castillo transform the footage from documentation – into a collective act of resistance. The film, which translates from the Spanish as ‘The Unloved,’ is not just a deeply empathetic portrayal of life inside prison; it is an urgent call to question a system that perpetuates cycles of oppression.
Agnes Houghton-Boyle will be presenting the screening of Malqueridas as part of the London Film Week on Saturday 8th of December 2024.
