C. Rojas: un cuento de los confines
Little Reds: a tale at the edge of the world
Little Reds: a tale at the edge of the world
C. Rojas is a film that captures through
a lens (for the first time in my artistic life) a performance and re-enactment of a bedtime story conceived as a dream, using the
film world elements to capture what’s beyond our conscious perspective. My
approach was to discover the universe of intimacy within the original fairy tale and to
plant seeds of my personal experience facing my lesbianism, my admiration for
the female gender and my dissatisfaction with the association of inferiority
and vulnerability that women have acquire in a male dominated society. My feministic perspective translates into
trying to understand the elements moving every character female character in this piece.
As my writing transitioned from theater to
screen, I found myself working in a new version of Little Red Ridding Hood, one where I was exploring the more feminist possibilities of the original
plot.
In this work I make the
main protagonist tridimensional by having a single female character become
three and having a fourth element (another woman) that refers to the original
story. After a natural disaster, three sisters locked in a house with their mother are looking to escape and explore the dangerous world beyond their fences. "Caperucita Roja" (Little Red Riding Hood) here becomes "C. Rojas". The first letter of the three main characters represented by the "C.": Carolina, Catalina and Cristina. And the color red represented by a common Chilean lastname: "Rojas"
In the outskirts there is a wild creature who doesn't have a name but is known as "Lobos" or the "many wolves" (also a very common Chilean lastname). He is the only male
character present in this piece. This character
is a man-like creature that has lost humanity and carries old visions of a patriarchal society.
In the film I present woman as the one who can take away that power and transform it in order to generate a more spiritual relation where she captures the essence of the male. The three female characters don’t renounce to a carnal instinct but consider it a transit point to reach another stage.
In the film I present woman as the one who can take away that power and transform it in order to generate a more spiritual relation where she captures the essence of the male. The three female characters don’t renounce to a carnal instinct but consider it a transit point to reach another stage.
They need to break
traditions and beliefs in order to grow freely, that is why I also add the element
of accident into the story through the presence of earthquakes that are natural
events representing my country of origin: Chile.
This experiment can
be seen as a journey of transformation for their characters and it was written
to bring the poetry of staged performance into film, also in a way to expose my
own experience in theatre.
The text is provoking and poetical and works as a composition more than
for narrative purposes. At the time the film was shot nobody in the project had actual filmmaking training. I worked with
painters, photographers, visual artists, actors and dancers. We used a low end camera, the only one avaialble, as a capsule to capture the fictional time of the story.
Filmmaking
is my way to bring to life the parallel world of my dreams. I want to create an environment that fosters
experiences on the subconscious level and that can potentially become the seed
for another person’s experience, recognizing the world we live in but aren’t
aware of because we tend to exist rationally, rather than intuitively. Or at
least, we think we do.
