Maria's Story: Twenty Years Later

By Maria Guzman



Earlier this month, I saw a twentieth anniversary screening at The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco. Before attending, I had an abbreviated understanding El Salvadorian politics, and the subject of the documentary, Maria Serrano. Filmed in 1989 by two young American women, Maria's Story: A Documentary Portrait Of Love And Survival In El Salvador's Civil War reveals the daily struggles and heartbreaking memories that lay in the wake of the political unrest that ravaged her town in El Salvador. The film chronicled a two-month journey for all involved. Ultimately, the film unfolds into a narrative about Maria’s role as a leader of a Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrilla camp, which was about being a mother, wife, and a community member.

Feminist Review recently spoke with the directors of the film, longtime friends Pamela Cohen and Monona Wali.

Were there moments during the filming of Maria's Story in which you felt that there were advantages to your position as women directors?

Pamela Cohen: I don’t know if a male director would have been drawn to Maria in the same way we were. We chose to put a female face on this war; we wanted to address the Che Guevara guerrilla image, because that’s not who was on the front lines.

Monona Wali: Because we are women, we were sensitive and committed to the human side of the story. There were times when we were drawn to the bigger side of the war, but beyond knowing the statistics, the instinct to stay close to Maria and stay close to her came from being women and cementing the relationship with her, which was affectionate, playful, and serious. I don’t know that a man would have been able to get that close.

Emeteria and Maria, two members of the community, discussed losing their daughters in the war. Hearing the details of how young women were victims in violent attacks in El Salvadorian towns effected me greatly. What were those moments like for you as directors?

Monona: With Emeteria, we had gone first to be with her in ’88 and lived in a repopulated community named Guarjila that we were going to use as a base camp. We had equipment, and it turned out that there was a huge military offensive, and we were stuck in a village. Emeteria was taking care of us; she was our mother during that time. It was the day of remembering the dead. She had come to San Jose Las Flores to be a part of that and knew us. We asked her, “How do you feel about this day?”

For Maria, it started in the bathing scene, and it came up spontaneously. We just wanted to get a scene. Every time Jose showed up, we turned the camera on because we didn’t know when they were going to be together again.

Pamela: But then we asked about it, and we knew we had to sit down with her to talk about it—that was separate. She was out of the country when Ceci was killed in ’87. That may be why she wouldn’t let go of Mijita (her youngest daughter) and made her a personal radio operator for the rest of the war.

How did your awareness about some of the issues raised in the film affect your work?

Pamela: It was six or eight months before we started editing. We thought, “After what we’ve been through… how can people not care?” We just felt like everyone had to know and were determined to finish it.

Cross posted at Gender Across Borders

The Last Days of Emma Blank

Directed by Alex van Warmerdam
Fortissimo Films



Emma Blank believes death is eminent. Surrounded by a sulky if compliant staff in her large home near the Dutch dunes, she shouts absurd orders in between bemoaning her fate. “Don’t worry,” she assures her impatient employees. “Before winter, I’ll be dead.”

Emma’s character is frustratingly distempered. Seemingly with no idea what is good for her, she demands an eel for breakfast, then violently vomits while her staff stands around shaking their heads with annoyance. It’s clear no one in the house has any sympathy for her condition, whatever mysterious ailment it may be. Meijer, the houseboy, expresses his hatred by mowing a swastika into the front yard. In cyclical fashion, Emma returns their collective disdain, at one point exclaiming, “It’s as if I’m surrounded by a bunch of toddlers with brain damage! Do your work with devotion, with a smile. Is that too much to ask?”

For much of the film, it is difficult to discern the relationship between Emma and her staff. Gonnie could be her daughter, or it could be a case of Emma’s misplaced affection. Meijer could be Gonnie’s cousin, or her boyfriend. In the beginning, Haneveld appears to be Emma’s husband, lying beside her in bed when she requests and adhering a fake moustache to his upper lip when she demands that he do so. Yet Bella, who appears to be the head of the waitstaff, also makes snide comments to Haneveld. “I’m not giving you another hand job for a while,” she threatens. Are they having an affair? What’s really going on here? How do these people know each other, and what the hell does it all mean?

Most alarming and the one truly humorous aspect of the film, Theo (played by director van Warmerdam), a fully-grown man, acts the part of the household dog, alternately bringing in dead peasants, humping Emma’s chair, and shitting in the yard. Does he think he’s a dog? Is this poor casting? Is it some sort of allegory about the plight of enslaved humans?

The central plot device—if, like me, you are unable to decipher what’s happening before it is actually revealed—happens roughly an hour into the film. With less than thirty minutes left to tie up loose ends, including Emma’s inevitable demise, the film rushes to an end and leaves several major storylines intentionally up in the air. Will the hired help inherit the house? Will their relationships survive in the wake of their time with their she-devil employer?

In Dutch with English subtitles, this truly bizarre, dark, situational comedy isn’t for everyone; frankly, I find it a stretch to label The Last Days of Emma Blank a comedy at all. But if you like feeling ill at ease, a bit discombobulated, or even thoroughly annoyed by what people will do for money, this bewilderingly strange film is for you.

Review by Brittany Shoot

Leading Ladies

Directed by Erika Randall Beahm and Daniel Beahm



It may seem quite an impossibility, but the film Leading Ladies is, simply put, a quietly revolutionary dance musical. While most dance musicals (think Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) center on the boy-meets-girl heterosexual love match, Leading Ladies is a beautifully wrought girl-meets-girl story. It is simultaneously a dance musical, coming-of-age story, and coming-out narrative. The power of the film comes from its ability to maintain the generic conventions of the story while completely rejecting the hetero-normativity that is typically the narrative thrust of the genre. What’s perhaps even more amazing is that Leading Ladies succeeds at thwarting convention within a conventional structure while simultaneously being a whole lot of damn fun. Lesser films would sink under such weight.

Helmed by first-time directors Erika Randall Beahm and Daniel Beahm, this joyous film tells the story of the Campari women. The matriarch of the family is ballroom-dancing stage mom Sheri, played by Latin and Ballroom Champion Melanie LaPatin. Sheri has two daughters: like-minded drama queen and dancing champion Tasi (Shannon Lea Smith), and Toni (Laurel Vail), Tasi’s practice partner and the wallflower of the family. The film centers on Toni’s relationships, particularly with the emotionally volatile Tasi, and an unexpected romantic attachment to Mona (Nicole Dionne), a bubbly and outgoing woman Toni meets at a dance club. While LaPatin’s acting is a bit stiff, Smith’s neurotic and self-obsessed Tasi is played to high-pitched perfection. Vail might be the real star of this film, however, as she says more with her eyes than many actors can express with a word. She artfully plays the Ugly Duckling, the quiet witness to familial squabbles and the glue that keeps the Camparis together.

Leading Ladies has an ebb-and-flow, alternating between slow and quietly stirring scenes and vibrant, fast-paced dance numbers (most notably a hysterical and boisterous number set in a grocery store). The heart of this film beats loudly and quickly, and it leaves the viewer invigorated and deeply moved. To learn more about her hopes for the film, its generative process, and the ideological concerns that lead to its creation, I recently spoke with co-director Erika Randall Beahm.

Beahm co-wrote the film with Jennifer Bechtel, a friend and LGBT youth advocate in Champaign, Illinois, and Bechtel was struggling to find mainstream films that spoke to the young gay community. As Bechtel and Beahm perceived it, most gay and lesbian cinema tends towards violence or explicitness, while mainstream cinema features gay characters as “the sidekick.” Beahm and Bechtel thus sought to create a “family-centered gay and lesbian film for the mainstream market.” Their hope is that Leading Ladies provides gay youth with a positive portrayal of gay romantic love and thus “open a dialogue within themselves” and perhaps between gay youth and their families.

The film eschews aggressive and explicit representations of gay love for a romantic and “joyful falling in love which... straight kids get to experience in movies all the time.” Indeed, Leading Ladies treats its same-sex couple as any movie musicals’ heterosexual pairing: they meet, they dance, they fall in love. The romance is beautifully articulated through an artful juxtaposition of two dance sequences. Toni and Mona’s meeting is shot like a typical dance movie sequence—bright lights, loud music, and overhead shots looking down on the dancers. This film could be Dirty Dancing, if it weren’t for the same-sex couples dancing on stage and in the audience. Indeed, this is the goal of the film: to illustrate that dance (and by extension, romance and love) is the same for same-sex couples as it is for heterosexual partners. Toni leads Mona through a raucous, enthusiastic dance, and as convention dictates, the two find love while dancing. In a beautiful inversion of this sequence, we next find Toni in Mona’s lush apartment, where the more romantically experienced Mona takes the lead in the dance of romance. The lovers’ embrace is gorgeously shot in sensual blush tones and shadow.

For choreographer and dancer Beahm and youth musical programmer Bechtel, dance served as an obvious choice of backdrop for the love story. Beahm choreographed the film’s dances with Melanie LaPatin and Benji Schwimmer, the former So You Think You Can Dance! winner who also plays Toni’s best friend in the film. For Beahm, dance has an inherently transformative power: “There’s this kind of kinesthesia with dance that gets people to literally be moved on a physical level, and I believe also on an emotional and intellectual level.” The love scene between Mona and Toni, for example, is highly choreographed to match the non-diegetic music; Beahm suggests that this emphasis on “energy shifts… and the musicality” of the scene helps the spectator “lose sight of this being a gendered duet, and it just becomes two people moving together, falling in love.”

By emphasizing the movement and musicality of the scene, then, Beahm hopes to ease the fear of spectators who are uncomfortable with same-sex coupling and perhaps open a space for internal dialogue within the spectator: “For people who might have a hard time seeing two women... make out, it becomes this kind of transference of two bodies going through these really emotional and tender but also choreographed spaces, and so gender becomes less important.” By shifting the spectator’s focus from gender distinction to the movement of the body the film illustrates how little gender matters and how love—like dance—is a universal language. Thus the film utilizes dance to open up a space for shifting “people out of the fear they may feel if they’re watching from an outside perspective.”

Though the idea of dance as a catalyst to ideological and personal transformation may seem unusual, Beahm is quick to point out that dance has often added a “queer element” to the movie musical. In West Side Story, for example, the spectator sees groups of men “snapping and skipping” and yet the dance isn’t “sexualized, it’s charged and it’s activated.” Dancing is particularly subversive in moments of unison dancing, she suggests, when members of both sexes dance the same movements, suggesting a unity of the sexes and the democratization of the body. Leading Ladies takes this democratization one step further, rejecting the hetero-normative ballroom dance structure of male lead and female follow and replacing it with same-sex couplings. In doing so, Beahm simultaneously feeds off of the democratizing nature of dance while rejecting the rules of a dance form that reinforces gendered performance.

It is the inherent queerness in dance that Beahm finds so appealing and in tune with her views on feminism. For her, dance and feminism are “compatible” because they are both “hard to pin down” terms; their “slipperiness” as terms allows them to create spaces for dialogue and questioning. She likes her feminism to work “from the inside out,” enjoying the notion of becoming part of a system, and breaking it down from within. This is why her personal mantra is the cheeky suggestion to “wear pearls to the country club and then talk dirty.” Ultimately, Leading Ladies represents a filmic expression of this mantra—by placing non-conventional characters within a conventional generic structure, the film wears its pearls but then lets out a glorious, enthusiastic expletive as it sits down to dinner. Swearing has never been so much fun.

Review by Joanna Chlebus

And Then Came Lola

Directed by Ellen Seidler and Megan Siler
Wolfe Video



Based loosely on the art-house classic Run Lola Run, And Then Came Lola shows photographer Lola’s desperate attempt to get to a crucial meeting on time, with her girlfriend’s career and their relationship on the line if she fails. Like the title character of Run Lola Run, Lola will get three chances to get it right, with the action resetting to the beginning after each of the first two attempts. Interspersed within and between Lola’s obstacle-filled journeys through the streets of San Francisco are on-the-couch moments with the five main characters of the film, who divulge their romantic entanglements and issues to a therapist who is more involved in the story than it first appears.

As is the case with many small-budget independent films, the technical aspects of And Then Came Lola leave a bit to be desired. The mediocre quality of the sound, lighting, and camera work can be distracting at first, but generally fade into the background once the story unfolds.

The acting ranges from mediocre to good without any really great moments, though the chemistry between Jill Bennett (as Lola’s girlfriend Casey) and Cathy DeBuono (as Casey’s ex-girlfriend Danielle) is definitely a bright spot. It is always a treat to see these two together on film as their real-life love for one another produces amazing on-screen fireworks. Unfortunately, connecting with the film requires sympathy for Lola (played by Ashleigh Summer) and her relationship with Casey, but the relative lack of chemistry between Lola and Casey leaves you rooting for Danielle.

As for the plot, while the resets of Lola’s journey are interesting (if unoriginal), the interconnectedness of the lesbodrama at the heart of the film is more than a little cliché in the lesbian film genre. Here it is difficult to tell whether cliché is completely a bad thing; however, as there is no small amount of truth in the film’s representation of the insularity and near incestuousness of the lesbian community. We lesbians do have a particularly bad habit of maintaining connections with our exes, and their exes, and their exes’ exes, and so on.

Although I recently saw And Then Came Lola on a list of the worst lesbian films, I don’t think I would go that far. It wasn’t Go Fish level bad, just a bit unsatisfying. Ultimately, it’s not a film I would watch again, considering the wide range of lesbian films now available, and it’s not one I’d recommend.

Review by Melinda Barton