Animated cinema is in full swing at the San Sebastián festival. If the opening day featured The Boy and the Heron, by the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, and yesterday it was Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal who took Shot at the Pianist out of competition, this Sunday it was the turn of the visual artist Isabel Herguera ( San Sebastián, 1961), who competes for the Golden Shell with his first feature film, El Sueño de la Sultana.
Inspired by the feminist story of the same name published in 1905 by the Bengali writer and activist Begum Rokeya, Herguera felt “a crush” as soon as she came across a copy by chance while sheltering from the rain in an art gallery in New Delhi in 2012. “I looked at the back cover and, without having read the inside, it was clear to me that it was a wonderful idea and I knew that I wanted to make a film,” he explains in conversation with La Vanguardia.
Eleven years later, that crush has become the first European animated film to fight for the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián festival. The film, whose release in commercial theaters is expected on November 17, contains several stories. She tells us about Inés, a young woman from San Sebastian incapable of dreaming who discovers by chance on a trip to India the book 'The Sultana's Dream', which describes the 'Country of Women', a place where they wield power, while men are locked at home, limited by their ignorance. But it also reflects chapters of Rokeya's "very interesting" life in a script that Herguera has worked on together with the Italian writer and composer Gianmarco Serra.
The director has visited India on several occasions, from 2005 to 2016. There she made several short films and highlights that it is a country "that fascinates me." She says that Inés has enough of her. Some of the experiences she goes through are personal, like the traveling part, and some are not. The delicate and magnetic animated line has three different techniques: that of the temporary tattoo, perfect for the country of women because it is very symbolic; the shadow theater to illustrate Rokeya's life and the watercolor for Inés' journey. And all this in 2D, which is much more elaborate and industrial.
Herguera wonders how Rokeya could imagine this world of women who live in a place where they are safe and where men are like beasts and pose a danger. She believes that she did it because of "the fear, fragility and limitations that a woman has just because she was a woman. In those times an educated woman could pose a threat to a man," she says. Although the director has not seen Barbie, her film is a bit of the animated and independent reverse of the Barbieland of Greta Gerwig's film. "I've played with Barbies and other dolls, but I didn't have any Ken," she points out.
Already in the first scene, an 11-year-old Inés appears in the Retiro park in Madrid who is scared by the cold gaze of a man. The film investigates the insecurity that women feel in all parts of the world. "In some places they are even worse because the law does not even protect them. And that fragility that you feel as a woman's body that can be attacked at any moment is something for which we were born, we have been educated and we have eyes everywhere. Women have to always be alert at all levels to be safe," she emphasizes. "I am not an expert in feminism, much less Asian," she adds, "but what I see is common to all women, wherever they are from, is the complicity in the fact of being a woman, and that is something that unites us beyond that we speak different languages or express ourselves differently.
In The Sultana's Dream it is surprising to find the philosopher and art curator Paul B. Preciado, a reference in queer theory, in an animated figure. "While we were developing the script, in 2015 Paul gave some lectures at the San Telmo Museum about utopias. He helped me a lot to delve deeper into Rokeya, to believe in his Ladyland. We asked his permission to lend us his voice and his character in the film" . And she is also grateful for the trust and support of the English academic Mary Beard, whose work and especially the manifesto 'Women and Power' revealed "a whole world" to Herguera.
The film claims the power of the dream, "something fundamental for transformation and sometimes we do not aspire enough. We do not give ourselves that margin to dream so much. Perhaps because the social pressure is too great since one has to fit into something quickly and too young," says Herguera, for whom this long project has caused her some nightmares. "It scares you a lot and you don't know if you're going to shipwreck or if you're going to make it."
The director's love for animated films is not vocational. "I did Fine Arts and I did video art and conceptual art, installations, I buried televisions... and after a resounding failure that I did with fried eggs, a friend called me to help him in an animation workshop for children. I had such a good time that Since then I have dedicated myself to this," he admits with a smile.
Asked about how she sees current Spanish animated cinema, Herguera responds that she is in a "very healthy moment, with the desire to do things, taking into account that there are hardly any animation schools in Spain." And she highlights the talent of professionals such as Alberto Vázquez, María Trenor or Irene Borra. "You have to take great care of that talent so that it doesn't leave," says the director, who concludes that she made the film "thinking that it had to be a pleasure for me and do it as best as possible. And I hope that the viewer enjoys it because We have put our whole heart into it."
