Michelle Farell’s video essay, “Santa y Teresa: A Walking dialogue between two Cuban characters” artfully carries out an interesting exercise. Looking at Pastor Vega’s Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa 1979) and Carlos Lechuga’s Santa y Andrés  (2017) the essay juxtaposes walking scenes of the two eponymous female protagonists to explore how one character’s narrative arc (Santa’s) responds to the other character’s (Teresa) narrative arc. In other words, the essay explores how the films’ walking women effectively speak to each other. 

By repeatedly playing the beginnings and endings of each film, both sequentially and contiguously in simple split screen, and quadruple split screen, the video essay brings the focus to a small aspect of the mise-en-scene: changes in the course of the films in how the women wear their hair. Farell traces the social, emotional and political journeys each women undertake in their respective narratives and in relation to the Cuban Revolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Santa y Andrés is set in 1983) suggesting that their hair carries a metaphorical significance with respect to the position of women in Revolutionary society.

At the beginning of Portrait of Teresa Teresa wears her hair down – indicating that she is an object of desire. By the film’s close her hair is covered up in a white kerchief as she strides confidently away from her cheating husband, her traditional marriage and the restrictive social roles imposed on her. But, as the essays also points out, she’s walking away from what remain the only roles/place for women in Cuban society, despite the promises of change in revolutionary rhetoric and indeed legislation. Farrell suggests that the control of her hair by the tight white kerchief points both to her freedom from sexual objectification but also to her continued oppression.

At the beginning of Santa y Andrés the white kerchief also containing significantly the colours of the Cuban flag, is part of the drawing on of Santa’s severe and stoic character obeying her role in the revolution (to watch over a dissident writer) to a “more measured character who can let friendship in”. Farrell suggests that Santa’s hair at the end of the film which she wears half down and half up in the same kerchief reveals her transformation towards a freer self and how hair carries the weight of meaning because her character has very little dialogue But, like Teresa, Santa is left with no clear options within the Revolution at the end of the film, able only to continue shoveling shit.