31/08/2023 - VENICE 2023: Andrés Peyrot dives into the wake of a lost film shot in the heart of a Panamanian community by the Oscar-winning French documentary-maker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau in the 1970s

"Today, you have arrived in the great house, the house of the heavenly guards", "47 years have gone by, the film was lost; it was here in Ustupu in 1975". The Swiss director of Panamanian descent Andrés Peyrot has thrown himself into an incredibly surprisingly cinephile and ethnological quest with his documentary God Is a Woman [+see also:
trailer
interview: Andrés Peyrot
film profile], which was unveiled in the opening slot of the 38th International Critics’ Week within the 80th Venice Film Festival. It’s an intriguing and tender testimony-film about memory, which delivers on a promise and skilfully lifts the veil on the past and present life and traditions of the Kuna tribe.

The project embarked upon by French documentary-maker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, who won an Oscar in 1962 for Sky Above and Mud Beneath, was to immerse himself in life in a village on the San Blas archipelago, located on the Caribbean Sea side of the Panama coast, and to film the initiation ceremonies conducted by this matriarchal society. The filmmaker ultimately spent a year filming on the ground, accompanied by his wife Kyoko and their daughter Akiko, in 1975. In Ustupu, the memory of this cinematographic activity is still remarkably vivid, but no-one has heard of the film since,  and for very good reason: it never saw the light of day, swallowed up by financial turmoil and definitively shelved upon the director’s death in 1997. But thanks to Turpana, who was born in Ustupu and who turned his back on his local "nele" (clairvoyant) status to become a pre-eminent psycholinguist in Panama, the film miraculously resurfaced (initially by way of abandoned, deteriorated film reels found in boxes at the Ministry of Culture, and then, two years later, via a copy discovered in a French cellar). It was time for the Kuna people to ask themselves: "How do other people see us? How do we see ourselves?" And a Special Screening was organised in Ustupu…

Weaving his film together as if a ceremonial blanket, and deftly interlacing past and present (sometimes to the point of superpositioning them), as well as the individual and the collective, and older and younger generations, Andrés Peyrot successfully builds suspense around the investigation which leads to the mysterious resurrection of the original film, but which mainly shines a light on the history of the Kuna people (including their painful struggle – reconstructed through fiction – against the central government and the military) and on their traditional (and highly mystical) culture as it squares up to modernity. Buoyed by brilliant editorial and musical choices (courtesy of Sabine Emiliani and Grégoire Auger respectively), the film moves variedly around its central axis and gets the most out of pretty weak, base material (by way of photos, video and sound archives, and testimonies vis-à-vis the 1975 shoot), orchestrating a multi-faceted confrontation between two very distinct worlds in a sophisticatedly simple fashion. And, ultimately, the promise is upheld (the film is reborn - "this documentary should remain in existence for all eternity" – and finds its most heavily implicated audience) as the Kunas’ prayer rings out: "protective spirits, I call to you before the silence of the night covers the Earth in its entirety."

God Is A Woman is produced by French firms Industrie Films and Upside Films Productions in league with Switzerland’s P.S. Productions, with sales entrusted to Pyramide International.

(Translated from French)

Photogallery 31/08/2023: Venice 2023 - God Is a Woman

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Andres Peyrot, Elizabeth Wautlet
© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it