INTERVIEW: Charting Paraguay’s difficult history in ‘The Heiresses’
Photo: The Heiresses, directed by Marcelo Martinessi, stars Ana Brun and Margarita Irun. Photo courtesy of Distrib Films US / Provided by Film Forum press site with permission.
Marcelo Martinessi’s The Heiresses, now playing in the United States, finds two romantic partners, Chela and Chiquita, facing an uncertain future after a decadent past. They come from a high social class and a great deal of money, but the country is changing beneath their feet. They’re older now, and the money stops coming in from their once enormous fortunes. That means these two heiresses must deal with the pangs of poverty and even the threat of imprisonment.
At the center of the narrative are the towering performances by Ana Brun as Chela and Margarita Irun as Chiquita. The movie made a splash on the festival circuit, and now it’s testing the waters with a theatrical run, including a limited engagement at New York City’s Film Forum.
“I feel as Paraguayans we have very strong identity,” Martinessi said in a recent phone interview. “It’s a very small country, landlocked, with a difficult history of a lot of dictatorships and a strong male presence in the public life. … The one rebuilding the country was always the women, so my work has always been toward giving more visibility to women in general.”
The characters in Martinessi’s movies, including The Heiresses, are often influenced by the filmmaker’s own family. The director said when he starts a new project, he often immerses himself in the world of his aunties, great-aunties, sisters and mother.
“I have four sisters, several aunties, and I feel that my way of entering the universe or discovering the world has always been through these women,” he said. “And I start writing dialogue, and then I realized that I could make sense with a story with all these women I met and try to portray also at the same time a bit of feelings I had more in a metaphorical level about my country.”
When Martinessi put pen to paper, the first construct that came to mind was the character of Chela. This difficult role requires Brun to show resiliency, despite deep loneliness and increasing poverty.
“The character of Chela came to me first mainly because I feel that we belong, like many filmmakers in Latin America, to a privilege class,” Martinessi said. “We miss out on a lot of life for being in the prison of a social class, and that was really my starting point. Sometimes losing the certainty or losing the feeling of belonging to a certain social class makes you discover a new world, and I also have this feeling that in Paraguay we’re always building prisons — prisons in our relationships, prisons in our social classes, prison even in our last name. We are not a very horizontal society, and I feel that traveling abroad and discovering other cultures helped me a lot to look at Paraguayan society from a different perspective. I think I could have never done this film if I was living in Paraguay full time. I spent a lot of time in London.”
He focused on certain families in Paraguay that have “long last names, but short pockets,” meaning they were once quite wealthy but have fallen on hard times. These are “very traditional families that were usually the ones ruling the country, and then when the army and the military came about five decades ago, these families began to lose power.”
The two heiresses in the film, for example, must sell items from their house to survive. Whether it’s furniture or glassware, the items of the aristocratic past are pawned for food and rent money.
“They just live off whatever was inherited,” he said. “But for me it was key in the film to understand that they didn’t inherit only money. They also inherited prejudice. I feel Chela and Chiquita are in many ways homophobic lesbians, women that were never fully comfortable in their own skin, growing in a society … full of prejudice.”
The production of The Heiresses was difficult, and the country does not have a long, storied history of filmmaking. But shooting the movie in Paraguay had some advantages. For starters, there is a general lack of rules when bringing the cast and creative team together.
“Making a film in the country is beautiful because you are making a miracle happen,” Martinessi said. “We could make our own rules. We shot the film in chronological order, which is a luxury nowadays. No producer would ever allow you in most countries to shoot a film in chronological order. I called the actresses and said, ‘Do you want to come and rehearse this afternoon because I’m in the mood to try something.’ … It was like making a film in a very comfortable environment. I don’t know if that exists a lot in a country where cinema is such an industry full of rules.”
Martinessi, whose previous films include 2016’s The Lost Voice and 2009’s Karai Norte, has an interesting anecdote on how he became interested and passionate about filmmaking. First off, his family lived under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner for a great number of years. Ever since his father was 10 years old and up until Martinessi was 16 years old, this regime was in place.
“We had the same dictator in the government, so it’s more than two generations,” he said. “But I remember on the TV, we sometimes had films, and the films we watched in my mother’s bedroom. We could never put the volume up because my dad was sleeping, so we had to watch them from 10 o’clock at night with the volume down. When I was a child, I saw a lot of silent films, but they weren’t really silent. So I had to make the story in my mind, and since then I was really curious about how to make sense with films. And I think I just continued developing it until now, this curiosity of seeing the potential images, and I also like to leave some room for the audience to build a story with me when I’m making something.”
He added: “I feel in The Heiresses, I try to leave space for the audience to fill in and to also put some of their own experience there, and I do the same thing with the actresses. I’m not the kind of director that comes in and says, ‘Put the camera there. You do this. You do that.’ I feel like the collective work is really important to me. I made my first short film when I was 13 years old, so it has always been my passion.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Heiresses is now playing in movie theaters, including New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information and tickets.
