SYNOPSIS
Every summer my aunts and mother, four sisters in their 60’s, spend vacations together at their family home. For me - the director - the trip is a yearly tradition and a fundamental part of my upbringing. As I document one particular summer, the desire to further investigate my own family history grows deeper.
After living full romantic lives, all of them are either divorced, separated or never married. What were the expectations for women of their generation and mine? How were romantic relationships and their decisions about family influenced by it? Through the daily lives of the women in my family, middle class Colombians, we uncover answers as well as additional questions: What am I supposed to make of my mother’s old photos with my father as a young couple in love? Was their love real? Who is this happy family looking back at me from the past? Our different ages and life experiences become apparent in a climactic scene that reveals that at its heart, this film is actually a coming-of-age story.
HERMANAS reveals a portrait of resilient womanhood in contemporary Colombia through my aunts’ heartfelt and often hilarious discussions about life and love.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
As women have traditionally been excluded from the public realm, their private spaces became the place where experiences were exchanged, ideas shared, and values transmitted. Spaces that are, by definition, unseen. Women in Colombia have suffered the additional burden of persistent violence, increasing their vulnerability and removing them from visibility. Furthermore, female voices were mostly erased from our own retelling of history. HERMANAS poses the question: what was it like for women to grow up in Colombia? Through the daily lives of the women in my family, middle class Colombians, we uncover answers as well as additional questions: What were the expectations for women of their generation and mine? How did it affect us personally and emotionally? How were romantic relationships and their decisions about family influenced by it? I want to talk about the experience of growing up as a Colombian woman within the intimacy of my own family.
The trust and closeness I have with them, allows me to enter a privileged space in which they discuss taboo topics with openness and warmness and my quest for my own personal answers, allows for a focus that unravels deeper truths. Each sister’s story manages to illustrate an important issue: love and sexuality taboos, domestic violence, women’s liberation, marriage, divorce, independence and being a career woman, women’s roles, motherhood, etc.
This film makes the case that our lives are worthy of being made into a film, because our stories are important and need to be told. The stories in this film, even though extremely particular to a specific place and point in time, have the potential to resonate universally, as they illustrate a multifaceted approach to adversity.
“By continuing to bring to light the ideas, attitudes and deeper thoughts of women, we allow for them to be valued and incorporated into our understanding of the world, and we activate their transformative powers.”
OUR TEAM
Paola Ochoa
Director, Executive Producer and Cinematographer
is a Colombian filmmaker and cinematographer. BA in Social Communication and Journalism from the Universidad del Valle. MFA in Social Documentary Film from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Co-founder of the production company Extranjero Films. She is cinematographer for the documentary film A Little Wisdom, winner of Best Canadian Documentary Film at HotDocs, Grand Jury Prize at DOC NYC, Best Camera Work at the Golden Tree IFF, and showcased at festivals like Busan International Film Festival, Karlovy Vary and SXSW. Her directorial debut will be Hermanas.
Pau Brunet
Producer - AMPLITUD
is a producer with over 10 years of experience in development, distribution and international sales. In 2012 he co-founded L.A.-based LA Panda Productions, a company focused on co-productions with Europe and Latin America. He is executive producer of movies like Open Windows, 10,000 Km, Lupe Under the Sun and The Chambermaid. Pau also produced some LGBTQ features such as the Tribeca awarded Nadie nos Mira, Grimsey and Anchor & Hope, among others.With Axel Shalson and Jana Diaz-Juhl, Pau has recently launched AMPLITUD a new financing and producing company focused on supporting Latin content and with an emphasis on LGTBQ and female perspectives.
Sebastian Sarmiento Bazzani
Producer
Co-founder of the production company Extranjero Films. Associate Producer of the Feature film “Señoritas”, Official Selection at FICCI 2013, Bell Lightbox TIFF 2014, and USA premiere at Lincoln Center. MFA in Filmmaking from the New York Film Academy and Bachelor in Filmmaking from the National University of Colombia. He was awarded with the India Catalina for ‘best short film by new creator’ from the Cartagena International Film Festival. He produced the independent film Antofagasta, New York, premiered at the Gibara International Film festival.
Jana Díaz Juhl
Executive Producer - AMPLITUD
is an LA-based Spanish multidisciplinary producer. Her feature films as producer or co-producer include Cry Now, Nadie Nos Mira, Anima, and Carlos Marques-Marcet's films 10,000KM (winner among others at SXSW, AFI and Malaga Film Festivals) and Anchor & Hope, premiered in SXSW, BFI London Film Festival and Rotterdam IFF. Jana is one of the co-founders of LA PANDA Productions. With Axel Shalson and Pau Brunet, Jana has recently launched AMPLITUD a new financing and producing company focused on supporting Latin content and with an emphasis on LGTBQ and female perspectives.
Paula Náñez
Sound Recordist
Paula Náñez grew up in Cali, Colombia. She graduated from Social Communication and Journalism at the Universidad del Valle (2011). Professionally, her career has focused on Art Directing, in the roles of Art Director, Assistant and Prop Master for short films and feature length fictions and documentaries. She was Sound Recordist for the documentary film Sisters. Recently, she works as a filmmaker, producer and editor for educational contents for the project Cier-Sur with the Colombian Ministry of Education and the Universidad del Valle.
Axel Shalson
Executive Producer - AMPLITUD
After spending twenty years in the education field, Axel has recently launched AMPLITUD with Jana Diaz-Juhl and Pau Brunet, a new financing and producing company focused on supporting Latin content and with an emphasis on LGTBQ and female perspectives. Axel’s first foray into filmmaking came with an investment in a film produced by La Panda Productions, “Anchor and Hope”, that provided the spark for a new passion and career, and led to Executive Producing the film “Tu Me Manques”, directed by Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellot, and starring renowned actors Oscar Martinez and Rossi Di Palma.
Juan Soto
Editor
Juan Soto studied the Regular Course of Documentary Filmmaking at the EICTV in Cuba where he finished in 2010, he has focused his practice in the film editing and the film restoration. Has worked with filmmakers such as Ruben Mendoza, Ana Salas and Natalia Santa, and with artist such as John Akomfrah, Gideon Mendel, Juan delGado among others. He has edited short and feature films, fiction, documentary and experimental films both in Latin America and Europe where he is currently based.
Story Consultants
Alan Berliner
Deborah Dickson
Marta Andreu
Editing Consultant
E. Donna Shepherd
Postproduction
La Tina Sonido
Chemistry Post
PRODUCER’S NOTE
Members of the company had decades of combined filmmaking activism. With the new company we hoped to track and support those filmmakers demonstrating talent, but sometimes lacking the proper expertise and financial support to develop and launch their films properly. With this in mind, on March 2018, the company started attending and contacting different work-in-progress programs in the search for projects that fulfilled that mission statement, and that is how we found Extranjero Films and HERMANAS at FICCI. Not only was Paola a young female voice from a country with an incredibly vital cinematic movement, but the footage and storyline had incredible potential for documenting the daily lives of one of the most invisible demographic in the world: middle aged women. It is also a moving coming-of-age film that seamlessly weaves together different generations. In order to elevate the film to its maximum cinematic potential, we have been working together with the Extranjero team and their recently hired editor Juan Soto. We also expect the film to resonate universally and achieve a hefty distribution success.
Something that the recent passing of New Wave’s godmother Agnés Varda has come to show is how rarely older women are allowed to be themselves in public spaces. The massive amount of love Agnés received these is due to her brilliant career and unique personality, but, we suspect, it is also intimately connected with the empowering energy that women around the world experienced from witnessing an older woman’s ever-growing curiosity, radical freedom and joy. In their tributes, filmmakers and fans alike declared their hope to grow old like Agnés did. As one of the few female filmmakers of her generation, her biography was exceptional, but the shocking part of it all is that, in her vitality, she was not. Older women, especially after the burdens of family-life pass, are often more radical and adventurous. Numbers prove that older women remain more engaged in politics, their communities, more likely to start new endeavours, and keep living with passion. The problem is we don’t get to see this very often. As executive producers, this is what drew us immediately to HERMANAS.
AMPLITUD was launched looking for new Latino voices with an emphasis in queer and female perspectives.
“Because we want to grow old like Agnés, it is a joy and a privilege to be working with Extranjero Films in bringing to light the transformative powers of radical womanhood.”
CONTACT US
Paola Ochoa
Director and Producer
paola@extranjero.co
Sebastian Sarmiento Bazzani
Producer
sebastian@extranjero.co
Extranjero Films
hola@extranjero.co
extranjerofilms@gmail.com
Amplitud
info@amplitud.net