In Correspondencias (2020) Catalan and Chilean directors Carla Simón and Dominga Sotomayor exchange personal visual letters about their daily life, their families, their desires and fears as women filmmakers, and their uncertainties about the future. The result is a delicate yet powerful short film that conveys a sharp portrait of what it is to be a woman director working in these rapidly changing times. In fact, the 2019 social outburst in Chile forces Sotomayor to rescind her personal ruminations and replace the domestic space with that of the streets. These textured visual letters that blur the boundaries between the public and the private came to my mind while watching Celia Sainz’s impressive Cinema Turns: Catalan Creative Documentary, which focuses on the work of women documentary makers trained at the University Pompeu Fabra.

Sainz’s video essay highlights the feminist strategies mobilized by a selection of four important Catalan documentaries from the last two decades that successfully distance themselves from hegemonic discourses. Against a chronological, linear time – that is, “straight time”– she remarks upon the non-productive, cyclical time conveyed in these documentaries; against transparent or objective discourses about reality, she celebrates the constructedness of these films through the presence of haptic images and their emphasis on the senses; against the hypersexualization of women’s young bodies, she opposes the embrace of the aging body of the women depicted onscreen. Perhaps one of the most poignant moments of this video essay is when all these aspects are brought together in a particular scene: an old lady whose body has been visibly impacted by the passage of time savors a piece of chocolate – the narration and the music we have heard until then come to a halt, and thus the particular exploration of temporality, the body, and the senses carried out by these films is brought to the fore. While the voiceover aims to critically analyze and theoretically ground these documentaries, there is something hypnotic in the sound and the rhythm of this female voice (that of Sainz’s, I suppose); its grain mimics and further enhances the hapticity of the images that populate the documentaries analyzed here.

Though set to address a specific question related to a body of works that emerged in a local context, notably to determine the characteristics of the school of cinema fostered in Catalonia, Sainz’s reflection has much wider implications. Cinema Turns: Catalan Creative Documentary highlights the role that women documentary makers have historically played in pushing the boundaries between the personal and the political, and between fiction and non-fiction.