A train that carries the cargo of sugar cane. That was the image that the director Johanné Gómez Terrero (Dominican Republic, 40 years) had of her childhood in San Pedro Macorís, east of the country, and wanted to capture in a documentary. But that image could only record it from a batey (a settlement settlement around cane cultivation) and the owners denied permission. This refusal was, however, an impulse for a new project, , A fiction feature film that portrays Makenya’s life, a 16-year-old Dominico-Haitian young woman forced to grow in advance of an unwanted pregnancy, in a country where and where some job opportunities are denied. That young woman lives in a bat in which her grandfather – one of those hired in the 1990s by the Government for the Dominican sugar industry – struggles for them, while the mechanization of cañaverales threatens their family with being displaced.
The Spanish-Dominican (-) co-production has been recently presented in Spain on a tour of Malaga, Madrid, Barcelona, Valladolid and Tenerife. According to Gómez Terrero in an interview with El País prior to the projection in Madrid, the film is like a river that is nourishing “many tributaries”, such as decoloniality, gender, motherhood, lineage and identity and spirituality.
Ask. He has made other documentaries and this is his first fiction, how was the process of moving from non -fiction to fiction?
Answer. This film became a fiction for the obstacles that were presented for the documentary. For three years we are looking for ways to enter a bat. I agreed to investigate, but for the filming we could not, and used that research to write. I started working with a concept that is critical fabulation [método por el cual un escritor da voz a una persona olvidada por la historia y combina datos históricos y ficción]. I question: my ancestors are not in the files. Who has access to the file? Who goes down in history? We have to make a kind of critical fabulation to fill those holes. I think that I also did with this movie, like saying: ‘I can fabular, I do not necessarily have to work with the concrete’. For example, the voices of enslaved people do not exist in our files. When a document of purchase and sale of a enslaved person is read in the film, the voice that is there is from the master. So that person where is it? That person has no voice?
It is a complex film to have conversations in Dominican now, but at the same time, I think you have to talk because there is an exercise of violence
P. Makenya’s story is crossed by genre, age, unwanted pregnancy, periphery and Haitian offspring, how does all that intertwine?
R. We are not isolated beings and I wanted to think about it from an eight curiel concept [antropóloga y filósofa afrodominicana] which is imbrication or intersectionality. I wanted to work all those layers. If you work in teenagers, it is not the same as a girl who lives in the city center and who is middle class has an unwanted pregnancy, a girl who lives on the periphery and has no documents.
P. Parallel to Makenya’s life, the film highlights the cane workers, like their grandfather. Why was it important for you to portray the life of the peasants?
R. I believe that the peasants and those who have direct contact with the earth hold the lives of all. In the Batey, when there was the privatization process, many cane workers were left without a pension after having dedicated much of their life to the work of the cane. Talking about Batey and Caña and omitting that would have been a very large omission. It is a present issue. The union of cane workers exists and still demands pensions, it is a much larger problem than the film. For me it was important to take care or look at everything I had to look. You can’t be an artist and not witness.
P. Why tell the story of a young woman who has an unwanted pregnancy in a country where in its entirety?
R. I saw him as an impulse, I felt it was an urgent issue. My niece was pregnant when I was 13 years old. She was very scared and her life changed dramatically because she couldn’t continue studying at the school she was. There was a social weight on her, as if she was to blame. I realized that it was not an isolated case and that it was more common than I thought. He also made me realize that poverty is inherited and there are family dynamics that are inherited. Because my mother had my sister being a minor, my grandmother had my mother being a minor. I had escaped a bit of that circularity, but I saw there an inheritance and a loop that could not be left.
P. In the Dominican Republic, the Constitutional Court of Dominicans with Haitian origin. In the film addresses the situation of these people born in the country, but do not have an identity card. Do you think the film is currently charged at the moment when the extreme right and antimigrant discourse is gaining ground?
R. It is ungreable because the denationalization is there. The fight of the cane workers is there. I would like to say that the film was outdated, but it is increasingly current. We have, there is a cut in communication with Haiti, there are massive deportations … It is a complex film to have conversations in the Dominican Republic now, but at the same time, I think you have to talk because there is an exercise of violence. We must understand that violence has many manifestations, and one of the many, that is, someone who was born in a territory who is committing a crime to walk that land where he was born.
P. Amnesty International An increase in threats against defenders of the rights of Haitian migrants, Dominican of Haitian ancestry in a situation of Apatridia and Afro -descendants. In this context, what is the meeting point between cinema and activism?
R. What these days and months with the movie I have proven is that, at least, we can generate conversations. I think the cinema allows people to look at issues that may not be looking. There are many norms, laws or limits that are imposed on our bodies. I would like to think from the place of hope, of the community, of radical tenderness. There is a very convulsive world of a lot of violence, many scales, and I just want to think so, that there is an escape.
