Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘Mohanas’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
I started at a local television station, InfoTV, which is now a producer, with which I have continued working. At first I didn't like the image. I had always wanted to be a writer. But I finally found a taste for it and became interested in telling stories through the camera. There was no starting point. That was in 2005: the beginning of a job, a passion, a look at the world. Since then I have directed or co-directed about 20 films. I have focused a lot on social issues, denunciation and historical memory. In 2009 I started a vital project that still continues: documenting the victims of the Franco dictatorship. In the Paterna cemetery, very close to my city, 2,238 Republicans were buried in common graves after passing through the firing squad. Their stories, through the mouths of relatives, have inspired five documentaries. I am also very interested in Latin America, its history, its social reality. I work with a couple of NGOs and sometimes, with a little luck, as happened in this case, they send me to explain their projects and their counterparts, something I always try to do in the most cinematic and creative way possible.
Tell us about ‘Mohanas’. How do you describe it?
The Mohana is the female version of the Mohán, a mythological being from the Magdalena River, the most important in Colombia. The Mohán, legend has it, emerges from the waters of the river to kidnap the most beautiful women in the region and take them to the depths. In the Popular Women's Organization (OFP), the oldest in Colombia, with more than five decades, they consider themselves a “mohanas” who do not kidnap anyone, but rather come to the surface to denounce the injustices of the region, the murders of social leaders, petrified poverty, theft at the hands of the powerful. And that has a risk. Some of its members have also been murdered. The documentary tells its story from the House of Memory and Human Rights of Women, one of the pioneer spaces in Latin America in recounting an armed conflict from the point of view of women. This place is one of the most recent landmarks of the OFP. And, secondly, the historical archive of the organization is valued. Between 2000 and 2006, years of war, these “mohanas” broadcast a weekly program titled, precisely, “La Mohana.” The images from before and now allow for a dialogue between yesterday and today and highlight the tireless commitment of these women, these “mohanas”, for total peace and a negotiated solution to the armed conflict.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
Michelangelo Antonioni, por su capacidad de profundizar en el ser humano. Federico Fellini, por el ritmo narrativo. Francesco Rosi, por el compromiso político y la honradez del relato, rozando el documental. Costa-Gavras, por su maestría de hacer cine de realidad política más compleja. Pier Paolo Pasolini, por el tono, el ritmo, la osadía y la innovación. También François Truffaut, por su pericia en la creación de universos literarios. Y más centrado en el género documental: Joaquim Jordà, Raymond Depardon, Agnès Varda y Gianfranco Rosi, entre otros.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
I would love to make a great documentary about mass graves across the world map. A round trip through geography and history. And see the peculiarities, similarities and parallels between different places. The Franco regime graves with their dead on the roads, in Spain. The graves of indigenous Mayans, previously burned alive, in Guatemala. Those who threw them into the rivers in Colombia. Or to the sea, in Argentina. The endless massacres in Cambodia and the fields littered with corpses in Rwanda. All of this accompanied by forensic teams and seeking the privacy of the victims' relatives until forming a kind of treatise on memory personified in a single suffering body demanding universal justice.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
It all depends on the budget. In essence, it would be a matter of contacting entities in each country, associations of victims and relatives, and carrying out prior production and documentation work on the ground to verify which families, through their cases, could best tell the story. All of this coincides with exhumations of the most representative entities of the country in question. That is in each of the countries. And once this selection was made, begin a type of filming that would generate a lot of material at all levels: exhumations, the intimacy of the home, the claims of historical memory entities, social and political reality, etc. This could take years of work. Then, through editing, the story would be told, looking for parallels and intersections between the different families, entities, forensic groups over time and in different countries. Thus forming a great mosaic of the struggles of families for their right to truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition.
What was the hardest part of making ‘Mohanas’.
On the one hand, systematize 45 hours of the OFP's historical archive and work on it with great care and attention to achieve parallels with the current era. And on the other hand, I managed to travel, together with the OFP colleagues, through certain places, very complex socially speaking, in Magdalena Medio, at a time when the classic actors of the armed conflict are once again rearming and fighting for the territory, which puts in risk the lives of the organization's activists.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
We are waiting for a grant from the Government of Spain to make a documentary about Republican soldiers who lost their lives under the bombs of the Italian fascist aircraft in 1938, in what is known as the Extremadura Front, during the twilight of the Spanish Civil War. Some of his relatives have been searching for clues that will lead them to his remains for years. The documentary would tell about this effort, how they organize themselves to achieve their objectives and what the result of this search is.
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