Winner of the FIPRESCI, the International Critics Prize at Locarno 2003, the first Bolivian digital film is making a name for itself and its filmmakers on the Festival Circuit. It’s important to us because the producer of this provocative film is Ara Katz, a Boston producer that has not only taken her film to winning in Locarno, Switzerland, but to great results in Toronto, now she and SEXUAL DEPENDENANCY are off to the Chicago International Film Festival, The Hamptons International Film Festival, the UK’s Raindance, and AFM. And it even gets better than that!
As we go to press, IMAGINE learned that DEPENDENCIA SEXUAL is the Official Nomination from Bolivia for this year’s Academy Awards, confirmed by CONCACINE, the nominating organization in Bolivia. By the time you read this, the press releases will be flying in from South America.
Ara Katz became involved with DS/SD, her first feature, when a lot of the film had already been shot on MiniDV in Bolivia. Director Rodrigo Bellott had assembled a short 6-minute piece for IFP in New York in 2001. When Katz saw the piece she immediately became intrigued by the project. After meeting with the director, her journey began. It took two years to raise the equity, edit the film, blow-up the film and bring it to market, selling the film in April 2003 before the Cannes Market. The film is being self-distributed in Bolivia where it is getting huge press since it opening September 11th
Synopsis: “The film is about five teenagers in Bolivia and the US trying to make sense of their sexuality, exploring the rituals, and conflicts of a poor, Bolivian-born girl, a rich, young stud leaving Santa Cruz for a university in New York, a Colombian boy visiting his cousin in Bolivia, a black female college student in New York, and a model/football player at the same University. Structured around issues of femininity, masculinity, virginity, rape, and sexuality, the five stories draw upon each other as each character struggles to make sense of their own identity. With nothing in common (socioeconomic status, race, nationality, culture), except the desire to experience true intimacy, their stories are woven together through an underwear ad campaign, representing everything thy feel they are supposed to be and everything they feel they are not. Their lives unfold and overlap as each character becomes victim to their own sexual dependencies.”
In an article by Ronald Bergan titled “Split Personalities,” he noted, “The first thing that strikes one about Sexual Dependency is that, except for one sequence, the entire film is shown using a split-screen technique. In a way this aesthetic choice has dominated all discussion of the film, detracting from many of its other qualities, both in style and content.”
Bergan elaborates, “But, the 25-year-old Bolivian director, Rodrigo Bellott, has taken the courageous step of choosing to use the split screen throughout in a consistently inventive way. Initially, it seems to be an arbitrary choice, but gradually one realizes that it is wedded to the subject of people split from each other and from themselves. In other words, the split screen is also a dialectical device...The parallel action sometimes repeats the scene from a different angle or perspective - on the left, a medium shot, on the right a close-up - or it is used to fragment time and space - an action is seen in another location either before or after the action in the twin frame. But all this makes the film sound over-schematic and impenetrable. Nothing could be further from the truth. The realization of the various interlinked narratives is both lucid and approachable”
The director explains: “I wanted to transgress the oppressive language of a single narrative image and to try and create an audio-visual dialogue that disturbs the complacency of the passive spectator.”
What comes through these portraits is a powerful exposé of machismo, linked with racism and homophobia. The split screen only enriches the portrayal of these marginalized characters.
This film is the first independent co-production between the USA and Bolivia, a country that has produced very few films. And interestingly enough, the film is in both Spanish and English.
Congratulations to Ara Katz and the rest of the SEXUAL DEPENDENCY filmmakers. IMAGINE will advise you, our readers, when a screening in New England is scheduled.