I have long thought that Sisterhood is feminism’s most powerful weapon and therefore the Patriarchy’s mightiest opponent. Tana Gilbert’s documentary Malqueridas, about incarcerated mothers in Chile, is an example of Sisterhood’s formidable strengths.
To understand this, it is good to know beforehand that the voice-over, spoken throughout by former prisoner Karina Sánchez, is based on the testimonies of at least twenty women, herself among them (a fact only revealed at the end of the documentary). Although presented as a single voice and story, we are in fact hearing the stories of many women, overlapping, sharing similarities and sentiments. This is not a story of one woman, but of Women. This is the voice of the imprisoned sisterhood.
Knowing this, my experience changed. When I still thought I was listening to an individual story, the omissions seemed conspicuous and questionable. There is no mention of the crimes committed, nor any protestations of innocence or admissions of guilt. The difficult question of whether this inmate bore any responsibility for the situation in which their children found themselves was simply ignored. It seemed like the filmmakers wanted to avoid us judging this mother, and maximise our empathy. An understandable sentiment, but one which reduces the individual to something like a propagandistic pawn. It is always easy to inspire empathy when you’re telling only one side of the story; the challenge is to do so when telling it all.
But now that I know this is a collective speaking, that all changes. It no longer matters what crimes were or were not committed, nor whether they were, or considered themselves, guilty or innocent. The focus now shifts from the personal to the political, from the individual to the collective. Because of course there will always be mothers in prison, whatever the individual circumstances. And then the question becomes, how are they treated? How do they react? And – implicitly – how should we?
Thanks to this approach, we’re no longer judging individual women, but the situation in which they find themselves. We’re no longer judging individual responsibility, but institutional repression. As director Gilbert says in the press notes: “Through its collective construction, Malqueridas challenges the dominant narrative in an attempt to preserve these women’s stories, their existence and humanity. In a context of institutional violence and marginalization, the collective memory becomes an archive of resistance.”
The filmmakers use photos and videos secretly made by the imprisoned women themselves, selected from around a thousand videos and four thousand photos collected over a six-year period. As a result, the whole documentary feels like POV footage. What once might have been considered experimental cinema has now become such a familiar aesthetic that it makes everything feel hyper-personal and intimate. But even more claustrophobic than you’d expect from a prison documentary. Not just because of the vertical cell phone image format (which the director likens to looking through prison bars), and not just because of the often low resolution, dark images and choppy frame rate, but because these images were shot clandestinely, so that any shots of outdoor or open spaces are always taken surreptitiously from a distance, from the shadows, through openings, and from behind backs and objects.
Some of the images have strange wrinkles that I couldn’t quite place. From the press notes I learned that the images were actually printed and then digitally scanned again – in order to give them a material presence. The filmmakers felt this was safer than only existing online. In fact, when some of the prisoners had their Facebook accounts taken down, the filmmakers were the only ones who still possessed some of the images – which they were then able to return to their owners, who were especially anxious to retrieve pictures of their children.
These photos are not just symbols or representations, but actual objects of love. Which is the strength of the Sisterhood most evident in this documentary: Love. Affection. It is the love they feel for their children, which both torments them and keeps them going through the years (“Happy New Year”, one says; “One less year,” is the reply). And it is the affection they feel for each other, which sometimes takes the form of a kind of adoption, with one prisoner looking after another, who in turn asks if they can call them ‘Mom’. An alternative family, in short. Sisterhood.
To be sure, their situation is often tragic. Children can stay with their mothers in prison until they’re two, but then have to leave. Either to stay with family or to go into foster care. From prison, the mother is helpless to intervene if there are any problems. All they can do is be on their best behaviour, hope they don’t get framed (we see the results of a police raid, with their meagre possessions smashed and strewn on the floor) and pray for early parole.
“Hide the phone!” we sometimes hear someone whisper, when guards approach. Although these images, all made by the women themselves, are edited together from different sources, they’re all obviously subjective experiences. Whether it’s playing with their children, lying in bed with a lover, or staring listlessly out of a barred window, what you’re experiencing here is the Subjective Collective. Which, I believe, is another great strength of the Sisterhood, on full display in Malqueridas.
The documentary itself, for which these women and mothers, these stories and voices have come together in one Voice, one Story, is part of the feminist fight as well. In the press notes, the filmmakers explicitly formulate their social goals beyond the screenings. Their impact campaign describes their commitment to ‘two lines of action’. Firstly, to change the mentality of those of us who haven’t lived this reality, and to promote ‘structural changes in the future in areas such as the possession of cell phones inside prisons in Chile, or the possibilities of mothering while incarcerated’. Second, to help strengthen the community of formerly incarcerated women, including a bookbinding workshop ‘for women who have served their sentences and [for] their children, where they will learn how to make notebooks and diaries that can later be sold to different distributors and as promotional material for the film’. Let distributors take note.
Chile/Germany, 2023, 74 minutes
Director Tana Gilbert
Production Errante, Dirk Manthey Film
Producers Paola Castillo, Dirk Manthey
International sales Square Eyes
Script Tana Gilbert, Paola Castillo Villagrán, Javiera Velozo, Karina Sánchez
Cinematography [Women serving prison sentences]
Animation Fanny Leiva Torres
Editing Javiera Velozo, Tana Gilbert
Sound design Carlo Sánchez, Janis Grossmann-Alhambra
With Karina Sánchez (narrator)
