Tatiana Mazú González

I'm a staunch opponent of lists and rankings. How beautiful are our imaginary bottomless bags and boxes, where we can collect without order, limits or hierarchies! In any case, I want to take this opportunity to sketch out a small constellation of explosive short films made by Latin American filmmakers —all women, lesbians, indigenous, "mestizas", exiles-. A network that we’ve struggled and continue to struggle to build. We are often asked to subscribe to a particular film tradition, to embrace its family tree, to ensure that our references are not European or North American. But we grow up in countries that lack national film archives -as Argentina- or state programs for restoration, preservation and exhibition that prioritize this type of cinema. It’s practically impossible to see Latin American or Argentinian films directed by women prior to the 1950s. Reconstructing this landscape that preceded us is a daily, militant, collective task -and mostly unpaid- carried out by critics, researchers, archivists, filmmakers, programmers and enthusiastic amateurs. But short films have historically been a territory without borders, where female and lesbian filmmakers of the 20th century managed to build, on the margins of the industry, a cinema where experimentation, activism, performance, visual arts, teaching, community workshops and documentary tradition were freely and radically mixed, in the heat of political movements. The rediscovery of this "other" silenced history of cinema fuels both our anger and our curiosity. In a contradictory way, it keep us in movement. It’s very strange and beautiful at the same time, how we discover echoes of ourselves in old films that until recently we hadn’t been able to see. Gestures that other filmmakers made fifty years ago. And that we repeat, without knowing it. Like ghostly complicities, in pixelated pirated files, they insist. And in that spectral condition, they allow us to understand who we are, where we come from.