This month, Alba Sotorra

This month Screen at the CCCB present Alba Sotorra

 

Miradas desveladas, 2008, 52', VOSE
Script and direction, Alba Sotorra
Music, Xavi Macaya
Editor, Gerard Gil
Post-production, Ábrete Sésamo

 

Alba Sotorra

Alba wanted to learn about the lives of women in the Islamic world so she hitch-hiked to Pakistan. She lived for thirteen months in Bosnia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and on her travels she met women artists who also experience their work as a means of personal development. Their different forms of expression help them to be more themselves, in their context, in spite of their context.

The desire of the author to discover realities which are so different to her own takes us to the origin of the documentary spirit, to a genre which began with pioneers who went out in search of the unknown to later recount it. Alba wants to transmit this search directly to the spectator, without a personal or an author's filter.

Although the style of the project starts off with a deep desire for content, Alba feels the intense expressiveness of her protagonists and cannot repress a certain aesthetic preciousness. Love of life, in spite of the difficult situation of some of the protagonists, fills the screen with colour, in much the same way that a woman dressed in a burka cannot be stopped from painting her nails

The author does not want anything to steal the space or the voice of the women who are going to be our eyes in this particular trip around the Islamic world. She approaches in silence so that they tell us secrets that cannot be told out loud, secrets that are really shouts from daily warriors, secrets that sweetly murmur images into our ears.

Alba went away to learn and in order to do so, she asked direct questions. Now she recounts it all back to us in the way she knows best: in an audiovisual whisper.

 

(Xavi García, Director of the Tarragona REC Film Festival)