Shady River
PerSo Award

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Shady River is a mining town in the extreme south of Patagonia founded in the 1940s, when the State decided to exploit the coal deposits. On a personal level, it’s the town that my grandmother paradoxically ran away in search of some kind of freedom. It’s the place where my dad was born, where a large part of my family lives. And punctually, where one of my favorite aunts, and main accomplice in the making of this movie, lives. But it’s also the place where the one who sexually assaulted me for the first time in life, when I was a child, grew up and committed suicide ten years later . And a bit of the initial motivation for making this film is to pull the movement from intimate and personal memories – which in the end never cease to be fragments of history on a large scale – towards the encounter with the women who live daily in that landscape and fight to transform it.

“Shady River” is a film about silence and its ideological condition in those who have known gender violence. On the silence of the women who live in men’s villages and on the possibilities of breaking it. The first materials I started working with were mute: photos, a book, Super8mm films, a 16m roll of a film that was never made and whose sound record was lost. So, this political notion of the silenced was also present from the beginning. When I was trying to think how these materials would sound, the tremendous Patagonian wind appeared as a possibility: a force in itself that doesn’t sound, but that makes vibrations by its power sound. The closest thing to recording the sound of the wind directly is perhaps the saturated interference generated when it hits a microphone capsule.

Shady River began as a poem that interrogated footage materials. Later, I remembered that somewhere there were familiar Super8mm rolls that we sometimes saw projected on a sheet when I was little. And digging further, I came across some MiniDV cassettes that my dad had filmed during a series of union struggles in the mine in the early 2000s. Later, in the editing process I managed to get my aunt to share the VHS of when she was crowned as “Queen of Coal” in the 1980s. Walter Benjamin says something like the past is waiting for the present to redeem it from its oppression. I think there’s something of that also operating in the way we were assembling the footage with contemporary materials and stories.