An audience prize winner at Berlin earlier this year and Costa Rica’s submission for next year’s Academy Awards, Memories of a Burning Body is an elegant hybrid of documentary and drama. Film-maker Antonella Sudasassi interviewed three older women in their 60s and 70s who grew up at a time of stifling societal expectations in the country, when female sexuality was a taboo subject. They are not shown, but speak off camera; their stories are rolled together into a single character, embodied by three actors of different ages.
It’s a simple technique but a powerful one: the women recall violence and suffering as well as moments of joy, all of which are deftly linked by a snaking camera that threads together the various time periods. It all seems so effortless and natural that you don’t at first notice how complex the staging is and how pleasing the storytelling rhythms.
In UK and Irish cinemas
