A non-fiction feature film by Vicky Funari, Jennifer Maytorena Taylor and Paulina Cruz Suárez
1998 / 16mm / 88 minutes

Synopsis

A Mexican domestic servant returns to her home village to confront her family about a painful memory from her childhood:  she was used as a pawn in a land rights struggle, traded away by her parents to the local political boss, and at age 12 taken as one of his “women.”  As a middle-aged woman, Paulina returns to her village to confront her family about what happened and encounters a web of intrigue and denial.  Paulina interweaves documentary and narrative styles to explore the characters’ radically different perspectives and memories of this vital, resilient woman.  The film is an exploration of the lasting impact of systemic violence against women, and a testament to the power of resilience.

Paulina had its world premiere in Havana in December 1997 and its U.S. premiere at Sundance in January 1998.  It was released theatrically in the U.S. in 1999, and was broadcast on the Sundance Channel in 2000 and on Televisa in 2002.  It is currently available for educational and non-theatrical exhibition in the U.S. through Icarus Films.

Filmmaker’s Statement

Our Process:  The working process for Paulina was collaborative, involving the producers, Vicky Funari and Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, and Paulina herself.  Paulina had a strong and critical voice at all stages of the process, collaborating on the script and weighing in on casting, location scouting and other aspects of the production.  During post-production, Paulina travelled to the Banff Center in Canada, where we were editing, to give feedback on the cut and to write and record her final narration.  This relationship between filmmakers and subject was at the time unusual in documentary practice, and it went against some of the dominant tenets of documentary filmmaking.  We intended to challenge traditional notions of the filmmaker as “auteur” and of the “objectivity” of the documentary genre, while ensuring that Paulina would be in control of her image in the final film.  We sought to confront a prevalent pattern in so many documentary and fiction films, in which women, people in developing nations, and those in marginalized communities are represented as “other,” “exotic,” or “victim.”  We knew Paulina as a resilient, creative woman, a survivor, and we wanted our film to reflect this.

We also wanted to challenge mainstream, simplistic ideas about Mexico and about the relationship between Mexico and the United States.  We made this film from 1989-1998, a decade when the physical frontier between the United States and Mexico was becoming increasingly blurred and when tensions were rising over immigration and economic interdependence.  We are mixed-culture filmmakers, and we are women filmmakers.  We believe that collective well-being depends on the ability of Mexican and U.S. cultures to bridge cultural and psychological borders.  We believe that women in particular need to listen across cultures, identify our commonalities, and communicate our differences.  We want to see mass media images that tell real and complex stories, with central characters who are Mexican, female, and fully-drawn.  We want media images that foster deep understanding.  We knew we’d have to make these images ourselves.

In 20^th century U.S. media, images of Latinos were scarce, one-dimensional and often denigrating.  In Mexican media, working-class and provincial women had been the central characters of fiction films, but these stories typically came to a tragic end.  In both U.S and Mexican media of the era, a Mexican maid, when she was seen in films at all, was usually no more than a passive object in the background of a scene.  In this film, Paulina is both subject and shaper of her story.

Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, Producer:  Paulina explores the ways in which significant social, economic, and human rights issues intersect at every turn in one woman’s life.  The film provides for critical discussion of deeply political issues that are at once specific and universal.  The crushing poverty that is endemic to rural life, a hemisphere-wide caste system based on amounts of European blood in the veins, and the often violent subjugation of girls and women are all crucial aspects of life throughout the post-colonial societies of the Americas, including the United States and Mexico.  Time and time again, these themes are left unaddressed by media producers and distributors in favor of “hard” news (i.e. guns, drugs, and dictators).  With Paulina, we have attempted to meet the need for films about the lives of women in rural and urban Latin American while focusing on Paulina’s inspiring and extraordinary character and life story.

Vicky Funari, Producer/Director:  This film grew out of a personal connection from my childhood.  When I was nine and my family was living in Mexico, Paulina came to work for us.  Although all the power dynamics that are typically in play between employers and servants must have been part of the scenario, as a child I only perceived love and mutual respect.  Paulina lived in our home and temporarily became a second mother to me and a friend to our family.  Her daughter Rosita became my playmate; I loved not being the youngest one in the house anymore and taking on the role of big sister.  Paulina soon knew everything about me:  she cleaned up after me, washed my clothes, found my hidden dens of Twinkies and stolen comic books and dismantled them without telling my parents.  But she rarely spoke to us of her own life.  As a child, I never noticed her silence.  She did give me one potent image from her far-away home village:  she told me about a tree in her garden that bore more avocados than her family could eat.  It rained avocados, each as fat as two of her fists.  I was thrilled, certain that Paulina and her family could get rich from that tree; but she explained that in order to sell avocados you had to have money to rent a truck to get them to the city.  Long after my family and I had left Mexico, I could still picture those avocados, rotting into Paulina’s distant, imagined native soil.

Eleven years after we’d left, I returned to Mexico, now a young woman, expecting a tender reunion with Paulina.  I got a polite, friendly handshake.  She asked why my hair was so short, offered to cook me my favorite meal of green enchiladas, and said, “Bring me your laundry, I’ll do it for you.”  But I was no longer a child, and she was not my family’s servant.  Instead of laundry, we told stories.  I told her about my life, and she began to tell me about hers.

When Paulina chose to speak, she opened a door between our worlds.  Our commonalties as women drew us together in easy understanding; yet our different experiences of class, race and culture had given us false pictures of each other.  Was this defiant, passionate, witty woman the same motherly Paulina who had cared for me when I was a child?  In the years since my family had left Mexico, my parents had spoken of her as a victimized woman, a single mother locked with her daughter into a cycle of poverty.  I was now facing a courageous soul who had defied the power structures of her village and her family, and who had raised her daughter into independence and self-respect.  My family had missed something.  Now I listened, mesmerized.  When Paulina joked, “You should make a movie about me,” I thoroughly agreed.

For me this film was a way to explore the silences between us and to replace them with speech and listening; a way to acknowledge the struggle of a respected elder; and a way to challenge oppressive norms.  For Paulina it was a chance to share her true self with a world that has so often failed to see her or hear her voice:  “I hope for the film to speak of the culture of Mexico and of how the powerful mistreat the weak.  I don’t know where this horror comes from.  I’d like to make a different world.”