TIFF 17 Little Girls Long to Be ‘Princesita’
Marialy Rivas, whose previous feature Young & Wild won Sundance 2012's Director’s Biograpy World Cinema Screenwriting Award, returns to the festival circuit with Princesita an unpredictable and darker tale of a young girl on the edge of womanhood premiering in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival.
A teenager in Young & Wild, and now a girl in Princesita, are both on their way to becoming women, and both are entrapped by external rules and impositions from society and from their families. Both must break away from what surrounds them in order to conquer themselves, and both set off towards an uncertain future, but which in the end, belongs to them alone.
Synopsis: In a distant land on the southernmost tip of the world lives Tamara, a twelve-year-old girl who has been raised in a cult led by the charismatic Miguel. As she becomes a young woman, she receives instructions for her mission in life: to carry a holy child, fathered by Miguel himself. In this dark fairy-tale, Tamara will realize that what she wants for her life is not what Miguel has chosen for her, and her disobedience will have consequences she could never have imagined as she desperately tries to gain her freedom.
Pain is the keyword to tipping the school teacher about the possibility that one of her students is being abused at home, though home looks like a paradise to the child herself. When I interviewed Marialys, this was my first comment to her; that the pain is so unexpected because the scenes are all so peacefully idyllic. She concurred stating she had not known when she began this project that it was actually about abuse.
I knew it was about what happens when society imposes a destiny upon someone who rebels and breaks away but the story moved on its own toward abuse than toward manipulation. Writing it, I wanted to save the child but realized I could not save her from abuse as the story took its own life. It aged me. Like I lost my own innocence along with the heroine.
I don’t not want the next movie to be like that and because of this one, I will be more careful in choosing, because I do not know where it will take me. Stories have a life of their own and I can’t control them.
How did you get into this film?
I start with a question as I begin thinking about something. And I started with a script which I wrote with Camila Gutiérrez, but the editor is almost the writer as well.
At the beginning of 2012, in Chile, a family was sent to prison; the father was the leader of a religious cult that believed that his granddaughter, a girl, was to give birth to a savior who would prevent the apocalypse from happening. The thought of this man and the way in which he regarded his granddaughter’s life purely as a vehicle for bringing children into the world, without stopping to consider what she might want, made me ask myself: how does the construction of the feminine identity come about?
I began to conceive the story, imagining a rebellious girl who would break free from masculine oppression and the schemes that were imposed on her. This girl would represent all women. But before long, I came to the painful realization that I wasn’t talking about a woman, but about a girl who lacks the tools she needs to free herself from an abusive adult. I then constructed Princesita as a film made up of fragments, memories, and stream of consciousness belonging to a girl who can’t help loving the man who controls her life.
We started shooting and one the second day, I had an intuitive idea to shoot the whole movie in slow motion, so that I could change the dialogue and enhance the sounds.
Really, if you look at the movie you can see the narrative comes from the cinematographic cooperation with music providing an ambiance, all of which combine to create an understnding of the heroine’s internal emotions.
It is like a painting with moods created with touches of color…
Like the opening in pinks and the closing in burning oranges…
Also using many screenwriters (Camila, the cinematographer, the editor and myself) creates different voices.
In the movie you hear his voice and her whispered reflections with some small dialogue like when the teacher comes to visit her parents…
Yes the voices add complexities. The quietness and landscape grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And as happens with abuse, the mind of the abused detaches itself; only fragments of memory remain, often like a dream. A child does not remember the tremendous impact; therefore the movie is told as a sort of dreamy confusion of impressions.
Did you do much research for the film?
Only after the film was shot. I did research and interviews with victims of abuse.
The music was pretty creepy too. The opening and closing titles were beautiful.
Why did you choose to allude to a fairy tale?
Children’s fairy tales, as originally compiled by the Grimm brothers, are incredibly cruel and dark stories. When this oral tradition is passed on to the New World in the form of writing, they are whitewashed, leaving us with princesses who only dream about being rescued. I thought that it was good to revisit this darker origin behind these tales, which is why Princesita has all of the elements: she’s a girl who lives in the middle of a beautiful, lush forest, at the mercy of a fierce wolf, who upon venturing out into the world, meets her prince charming and fairy godmother. But unlike what happens in fairy tales, here the Princesita, Tamara, must react and save herself. She finds freedom but paid a price for it.
What is the relationship between Tamara and Miguel?
This relationship is the pillar upon which the entire film is built upon: a girl and her predator. Tamara is a girl that seems empty, frozen, but her inner world is ebullient, confusing, dark and sensual. Miguel is enormous, absolute, and tremendously seductive. Understanding that an abused child has no other option but to love his or her abuser, that the body feels pleasure in spite of itself when it is stimulated, that memories are always partial and confusing is a tough pill to swallow, but it is violently real and incredibly important to portray in a film.
To Tamara, Miguel is her north and her point of reference. The only question that remains is: will Tamara be able to wake up to the horror?
In this coming of age story of heightened visual beauty, Tamara perceives her surroundings as paradise, though instinctually she can sense the darkness that lies beneath. In this unsettling fairy tale, all hell breaks loose and we bear witness to one girl´ s story of human resilience and her triumph of spirit amidst a horrific reality. Her survival may give us a sense of tranquility, however it is one that is painful and ambiguous, and one that is perhaps closer to the truth. I Tamara is forced to transition into womanhood under a mentality shaped by a domineering masculinity, and her journey is one that somehow represents the experience of all women. If feminine identity is constructed under social patterns of abuse and misogyny, how do we manage to break away and find ourselves?
The question is what makes feminine or “the female”?
Yes, as a lesbian I knew at a very early age I did not fit in with societal norms. Everything comes from the outside in society and it shapes us. And a woman is only seen when she is between 14 and 40 when she can bear children, while a woman can serve men.
When did you know you wanted to make films?
I knew at 7. I went to the Waldorf School, we had no TV til I was 18, but I went to movies three times a week and saw everything from American Westerns to Tarkofsky when I was 10. I saw many movies many times, like Paris Texas I saw three times in one day. First with my parents, then alone and then with a friend. I grew up in the Pinochet era and while i did not know everything that was happening, I felt evil around me. Movies gave me an escape.
Chile has a darkness to it…when I compare it to Argentina especially. Both had dictators…
Chile still doesn’t acknowledge Pinochet’s evils. There is no dealing with it. They still call Pinochet “President”. The other day someone said he took care of “other people’s human rights”…what “other people”?
78min — Chile / In Spanish with English subtitles. ISA: Mundial. A coproduction with CORFO, Chile, Spain, Ibermedia, Sundance and INCAA of Argentina.
Marialy Rivas is a Chilean filmmaker who works at Fabula, a Chilean production company owned by Juan de Dios Larraín and Pablo Larraín. working with promising and well-known Chilean directors and producers such as Pablo himself; triple Oscar® nominated Jackie, El Club (Berlin Silver Bear 2015) and No (Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination 2013), Sebastian Lelio; A Fantastic Woman (Berlin Silver Bear for Best Screenplay 2017 and in TIFF as well), and Gloria (Berlin Silver Bear for Best Actress 2014). Her award-winning work includes two feature films Young & Wild (2012) and Princesita (2017), and three short films, Blokes, Melody and Desde Siempre.
Her work has played in various film festivals around the world including the official competition at Cannes with in 2010; Sundance 2012 where she won the Director’s Biograpy World Cinema Screenwriting Award with Young & Wild; and Berlin, San Francisco, New York, Havana, San Sebastian and Stockholm. Her critically acclaimed work has earned awards around the world. Rivas is a Sundance alumni and has attended two of their prestigious and exclusive programs: The Screenwriters Lab in 2012 and the Sundance Music and Sound Design Lab at Skywalker Sound in 2015. She has been awarded with various grants, including the one given by Sundance in 2014 through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to shoot Melody, a short film that was picked up by the NY Times for their Op Docs section.
Writers: Marialy Rivas, Camila Gutiérrez
Producers: Juan de Dios Larraín, Pablo Larraín
Starring: Sara Caballero, Marcelo Alonso, María Gracia Omegna
Cinematographer: Sergio Armstrong
