The Puerto Rican filmmaker Glorimar Marrero explore in your film “The Fishbowl” the duel and the ravages of “American colonialism” in his country through the cancer of an artist.
“The film serves us a bit as an activist letter to talk about the issue of colonialism and to sow the seed for the search for additional information,” Marrero said in an interview with EFE.
The movie was part of the international fiction selection at the Sundance Festival which ends its face-to-face edition this Sunday in Park City, Utah (USA).
“La pecera”, a Puerto Rican and Spanish co-production, begins with the revelation that Noelia’s cancer, a visual artist played by Isel Rodríguez, has metastasized and that, to everyone’s surprise, she will decide not to treat it anymore.
Although her protective boyfriend and her family will seek to change her mind, the woman decides to return to Vieques (Puerto Rico), her place of origin to resume the fight with activists who seek to clean up toxic waste in the territory that in the past was a base of US military tests.
“For me it was important to work on issues related to illness, self-determination and the colony”said the director, who began writing her feature film after the death of her mother in 2013 due to the same disease that her main character lives.
This territorial invasion that Puerto Rico has suffered in its history is expressed as a metaphor in the film through the invasion of cancer that Noelia faces.
“The female body colonized with cancer helped me to talk about the disease in Vieques (Puerto Rico), that’s how I wanted to develop it,” said Marrero.
The filmmaker presents a physical journey undertaken by the protagonist, but also a sensory one, since the contact that Noelia has with fabrics, water, sand and even her own hair, submerges the viewer -without words- into an internal and painful world.
“She is a plastic artist. I imagine Noelia as a very bodily person, very sensory, with her senses very awake and precisely for this reason, the disease jams (shakes) her so much and makes her make the decisions she makes, “he replied. Rodriguez.
The actress from “El cuartito” had to consult several women who had suffered complicated illnesses in order to understand a little how she should embody the pain experienced by her character.
“They gave me many descriptions of how this disease began, but also their private life, their intimate life. I asked them questions about whether they went out, if they drank, what sex was like in this situation so that I could understand getting at least a little closer ( little),” he said.
a female community
Another political position of Marrero in the film was the conscious choice to narrate a story starring and made by women.
“I knew that the central figures would be female, that the tour would pass through a woman in her forties and her relationship with her mother, but the project also includes community activists from Vieques, I wanted to show these leaders,” the filmmaker mentioned.
Also, the vast majority of the leadership positions in the various departments of the film’s production were held by women as a “work ethic issue to strengthen the female filmmaking community,” Marrero explained.
The film, which was shot in just 20 days, also is part of the Göteborg Film Festival in Sweden and will be present at another “prestigious European festival” that they cannot confirm yet.
In addition, Marrero announced that He is currently working on a new film, also a Spanish co-production.
Source-news.google.com