Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez is in International competition at Doclisboa this week with her new film Perplexed Ants. The documentary chronicles the protests, sit-ins and strikes of workers in southern Spain as they face up to the prospect that they might be laid off.
Explaining how she came to make the film, Rodríguez first looks back into her own past.
“When I was young, when I started shooting my own films, I won’t say that I had guaranteed financing, but access to it was possible. I never directed industrial/commercial films, but documentary films through which I tried to experiment with my own ways of approaching reality. With my first film I was very lucky because I was mentored by two extraordinary women, Diane Weyermann and Jytte Jensen. They allowed me to find a little space for myself in documentary filmmaking,” the director and producer (whose previous credits include such titles as Magic Worlds and The Diver and the Mermaid) recalls.
Twenty years ago, Rodríguez had begun to make a living from filmmaking. She received Mexican public money (she was then living in Mexico), as well as backing from organisations like Sundance Documentary Program, Ford Foundation, Ibermedia and IDFA. Her films had “a modest distribution,” but her international reputation was growing and her work was often shown at major festivals.
“In between I had a son. One day they called me to propose the Quintero film and so I returned to live in Spain,” the director recalls how she returned to Spain, where she was born in 1972, to make Mi querida España (2015), her award-winning film on revered journalist, Jesus Quintero.
When she finished that doc, she encountered difficulties in getting her next projects off the ground.
“Andalusia is one of the most difficult places to get funding for this type of filmmaking and that was added to the fact that I am the sole caregiver of my son. So I stopped filming for seven years. When my son grew up and I was able to start filmmaking again, a rebellion against the Ortega government broke out in Nicaragua and a wave of repression (which still hasn’t stopped), and I tried to make a film in that context. I went to Nicaragua to investigate and I felt very scared for my life. Then I thought about how to film it, putting it in other contexts and I was very close to being able to finance it. Then came the pandemic and everything fell apart.”
The pandemic left her at a low ebb. The new ways of commissioning, distributing and financing films left her feeling marginalised. She wasn’t enthused at the idea of spending years on a project as it was workshopped, pitched and processed through labs and consultancies. “I don’t want to do any of that. I just want to shoot and tell stories,” she declares.
The director realised she herself was caught up by historical forces that were affecting millions of others. “I thought that what was happening to cinema and what was happening to me, that transformation due to the death of one industrial revolution and the convulsive birth of another (digital, algorithmic, AI, etc.), if true, would surely happen elsewhere as well.”
This gave her the idea for a potential film about a “world in which more and more people are becoming expendable.” She mentioned the idea to director of photography Agustín Hurtado, but admitted she was struggling to get the project off the ground. “He said ‘to hell with the financing, I’ll lend you the equipment and I’ll make it with you.’”
That was how Perplexed Ants started. “We approached the shipyards, an eternal source of conflict, and started filming. In that context I met the Airbus workers and accompanied them throughout the process,” the director remembers. “We filmed for three years and I don’t know how many hours of footage I have, about 100 hours, I think.”
When she began filming, Rodríguez made it clear to the strikers that she wasn’t a journalist working on a piece of reportage. She was a documentary maker making a film about the “convulsive changes” of the late industrial era and how ordinary people were caught up in the terrible turbulence of the times.
Rodríguez abides by her own strict code of documentary ethics. “There is one thing that is important to me, I never try to convince anyone to be filmed. I only film those who accept beforehand. I don’t believe in predatory filmmaking that puts people on a tight spot.”
The post-production process was painstaking. At different times, the film has existed in approximately 30 different versions. The director was determined that she didn’t want to make a piece of militant agit-prop. Therefore, even when some of the footage, for example police repressing the protesters in violent fashion, was very powerful, she wouldn’t always include it. She talks of trying to find the “inner truth” of the material.
“The inner truth is that the characters in the first story are reasonably terrified of becoming the characters in the second part. Because the characters in the first story have a direct labour contract that they are losing and will become outsourced workers…The subcontracting model brings poverty and loss of labour rights. Poverty impacts people’s bodies in very obvious and visual ways. Those in the first story are afraid of becoming those in the second. Those in the second are afraid of death.”
The director sent the last cut without post-production to Cíntia Gil at Doclisboa to ask for her feedback. Gil shared the doc with the programming team who approved its inclusion. “I haven’t done anything else and there is no one else behind the film. There is no distribution yet. it’s a miracle that there is a film. I’ve barely been able to breathe and as soon as I get back from Lisbon, I’ll start thinking about how I’m going to make it fly.”
The documentary may seem bleak and pessimistic but that is not how the director regards it. She describes it as a story about “men and women facing extraordinary circumstances as best they can. I named it Perplexed Ants because I feel they have that fragility. Perplexed Ant, in fact, is the way I’ve been presenting myself on social media for years….the conditions are adverse, but life breaks through and despite the adversities and their own limitations they [the workers] continue to resist. So do I.”
