Synopsis
Melisa (24) has five girlfriends from childhood whom she interviews. While shooting
from behind the camera, she talks with them about their childhood and teenage
experiences to try to deepen in the implications that being a woman had throughout
their lives. These stories told in intimacy are compared alternatively with Melisa’s
experience, (re)constructed from images from her personal archive along with a voiceover narration.
From this interrelation of testimonies, the film thinks, with humor and candidness,
about the cultural construction of the female gender and tries to denature its “musts”
and “musts not”, especially those related to the image.
Why do I have to smile?
Why am I mistaken for a man?
Why is being pretty so important?
Why does the look of the others matter so much?
Director's bio
Melisa Liebenthal is a film director graduated from Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. She specialized in essay-film at Escuela Internacional de
Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba. Between 2017 and 2019, she was a resident at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains in France, where she was mentored by Béla Tarr and Patrick Jouin and from where she graduated with honors, being granted a residency at Villa Medicis in Rome.
Her first feature film, Las lindas / The pretty ones (2016), won the Bright Future Award at IFFR, Best Argentinian Director at BAFICI and Best Film at Asterisco IFF in Buenos Aires; and was screened in dozens of festivals around the world, such as Torino, Edinburgh, Mar del Plata and Seattle.
Her short film Constanza (2018) was awarded Best Short Film of the In my shorts Competition at Queer Lisboa.
Her short film Aquí y allá / Here and there (2019) won Les Amis du Fresnoy Prize for Best Film of Panorama 21 at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, France, and had its World Premiere at the Tiger Short Competition of IFFR 2020.
