Like most Spaniards, filmmakers Gemma Cubero and Celeste Carrasco grew
up with bullfighting held up as the quintessential symbol of
masculinity and bravery in Spanish culture. Their directorial debut,
Ella es el Matador, challenges that deeply-rooted cultural stereotype
by telling the controversial story of female matadors.
When they
started the film, “we hardly knew anything about bullfighting, and both
of us disliked bullfighting,” Cubero admits. “It was hard at times to
watch certain aspects of the bullfight.” Cubero continues “The point,
however, is that this film is not about being pro or anti bullfighting.
The point is to do what you love no matter what.”
The spark for
Ella es el Matador, came in San Francisco in the late 1990s, during the
production of Lourdes Portillo’s award-winning documentary Señorita
Extraviada. Cubero and Carrasco, who both worked on that film, credit
Portillo as a mentor and source of inspiration “she introduced us to
documentary filmmaking and has been a teacher ever since.”
Cubero
remembers “we had both been living in the States for several years and
had gained some distance from Spain. We read in the New York Times that
the only known female matador of the 1990’s, Cristina Sánchez, was
quitting because other male matadors at the top didn’t want to share
top billings. This sparked our interest and we decided to research what
was behind the news. When we started the project we became fascinated
with these questions – ‘Why would a woman want to be a matador?’ ‘What
do they feel in the ring?’ ‘Why do they do it?’”
Cubero has gone
on record as saying that Ella es el Matador began as a gender story,
but nine years later the finished film is a richer, more complex story.
The way the matadoras talk about themselves and their lives is a tale
of struggle to overcome and what's involved in that struggle.
In
many ways, the struggle of the matadoras mirrors Cubero and Currasco’s
own struggle to get the film funded, made and shown. Cubero and
Carrasco “have also faced great obstacles, had to be determined to move
forward despite the obstacles and believe in ourselves.”
Cubero
says “Getting access to the closed, private world of bullfighting was
one of the major challenges” and “there were many male bullring
managers who refused to speak with us about the issue of female
matadors.” She continues “The second, equally big challenge was
fundraising for a project that doesn’t fall within most of the funding
guidelines of foundations as well as being such a controversial subject
matter.”
Carrasco’s cinematography brings well-crafted
aesthetics and a sense of art to the gory details of bullfighting, but
bullfighting remains a controversial sport, and female matadors more
controversial still. “We chose a subject matter that was very
controversial within Spain and a foreign subject to most Americans.”
Will
they shy away from controversial subjects in future films? “No we
certainly won’t shy away from controversy nor do we seek it. We wanted
to do this film because it was an important story that needed to be
told and it happened to be controversial. In the future, we will
continue to look for stories of depth and courage that may or may not
happen to be controversial. We are not afraid of controversy, as long
as we feel passionate about the story and the need to share it with the
world.” Their next film is about Queer Tango, continuing to play with
gender roles.
Funding to date for Ella es el Matador has been
raised entirely in the U.S.¬ including a grant from Latino Public
Broadcasting, a Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award for
Documentary and the generosity of individual donors, made easier
because of fiscal sponsorship through the San Francisco Film Society.
The film also recently won $2,500 as one of the inaugural Herbert
Family Filmmaking Grants– part of the Film Society’s grants and
residencies programs, designed to foster the creativity and further the
careers of independent filmmakers.
Cubero and Carrasco are not
entirely surprised that funding has been raised outside their home
country. “In Spain, it is harder to break in and it is more of a
closed, male filmmaking world. In many ways, this film needed to be
made outside of Spain and receive its success outside in order to gain
recognition within the country.”
Despite the challenges they’ve
faced on the home front, the final title of the film has been
intentionally changed to the Spanish Ella es el Matador (“She is the
Matador”). “We wanted to have the title in Spanish, because in Spanish
we can play with the feminine (Ella) and then follow it with the
masculine (el Matador).”
Ella es el Matador offers intimate
profiles of two female matadors currently in the arena: the acclaimed
Mari Paz Vega and aspiring matador Eva Florencia. Cubero and Carrasco
faced additional challenges finding matadoras who were also willing to
open themselves up to neophyte filmmakers. As gender pioneers, there is
a natural wall of protection that the matadoras have built around
themselves, and developing trust and intimacy with the matadoras was an
essential but tricky early step in the filmmakers’ journey. “It took a
lot of trust. We had to build a very solid relationship with our
protagonists so they would know that we were not judging their choices.”
The
film has achieved increasing success recently. Shown in June at the
SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, they’ve also now
signed with Women Make Movies as their North American Distributor. Ella
es el Matador will premiere on September 1, 2009 on PBS’s Emmy
Award®-winning P.O.V.. See http://www.pbs.org/pov/matador/ for
additional details. P.O.V. has received more emails than usual,
questioning the programming of the controversial film.
When
asked about lessons she has learned in long journey of making Ella es
el Matador and what advice she has for fellow struggling filmmakers,
Cubero mused “Determination and passion; the same things it takes to be
a matador. Plus a little bit of luck. As Maripaz says ‘you have to grab
the bull by the horns.’”
