01/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: The Swiss filmmaker of Panamanian origin spoke to us about the adventure involved in making his documentary about the Kuna community and following in the tracks of a lost movie

The Swiss director of Panamanian origin Andrés Peyrot is currently based in Paris. God Is A Woman [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andrés Peyrot
film profile] - selected to open the 38th International Critics’ Week within the 80th Venice Film Festival - is the first feature-length documentary made for the cinema by this director, who has also worked in television and has held roles as an editor and director of photography.

Cineuropa: How did you find out about Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau’s documentary shot in Panama in 1975, which subsequently disappeared and which is the guiding thread of your film?
Andrés Peyrot: It all began with the Kunas. Some of my family live in Panama and I’d been interested in making a project about the Kunas for some time, but I didn’t have a specific angle in mind. I got talking to a young Kuna filmmaker at a festival, and he invited me to spend a few days in his community. His family comes from Ustupu, which is where Gaisseau’s film was shot. And when I was over there, and I naively said that I found it really inspirational and that I’d like to shoot a film there, they laughed and said that a French filmmaker had already tried that 50 years ago, that it didn’t go very well and that it had become a bit of a joke to them. I asked them a few questions, a few stories were told… The more they spoke about it, the more I realised how surprising the story was. It made me want to dig deeper, and the more I found out, the more I wanted to know, and that was what I felt the film should be about. That was ten years ago.

When did you find out that there were film reels in the Panamanian Ministry of Culture, not to mention a hidden copy of the film in France? Was it pure luck?
It was a combination of luck and a lot of patience, and one of the reasons this film took such a long time to make. In the first instance, there was a lot of research involved to try to understand the story, to find out who was still alive and could give me information, but there was no guarantee that I’d be able to track down the copy, or that it was even traceable. Over time, I finally managed to prise the Ministry’s doors open, because they hadn’t responded to the Kunas’ requests. It was a matter of luck, because the new Deputy Minister was formerly a student of Turpana’s (who was one of the documentary’s Kuna protagonists, ed). We were incredibly disappointed when we realised that the copy had been destroyed by damp. But we had a second shock when Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau’s daughter, whom I’d met in Paris, told us that a friend of her father’s had called her, telling her that the filmmaker had stored lots of reels at his home and that he wanted her to pick them up because he needed the space back. It was a huge surprise to find out there was a second copy in Paris.

Using this search for a lost film as your starting point, was it mostly a portrait of the Kuna people that you wanted to paint?
It was really important not to say anything that wasn’t said directly by the Kunas themselves. I wanted to revisit the story from their point of view, even if it meant sacrificing certain details. I wanted to focus on a limited number of characters, notably on their emotional connection to this story, on their personal viewpoints rather than on who was going to share the story, and on how it would be said rather than what was going to be said.

Video and sound archives, superimposition of images…  You use a lot of different sources.
Playing with textures and different images is something I anticipated doing while writing the film, and this idea was reinforced in the editing phase. I knew that this combination of time periods and viewpoints would lead to a combination of different materials, and that it would enrich the film if we incorporated them, making sure we got the balance right to make sure it worked. As for superimposing faces, I was a bit nervous that it wouldn’t work, but I really wanted to try. I realised that we had to leave the cameras rolling for a very long time and that we had to allow space for accidents to happen, where what was intended connected with the person, that something interesting happens in the shot from a graphic perspective but that an emotion falls into place too. I also wanted to try to re-transcribe in a slightly spiritual way what can happen emotionally at a given moment, to use something other than words, to create a space where that person’s spirit is caught in a parallel place, between the past and the present, and film and memory. I liked this idea even more for the fact that the Kuna people really do believe in parallel dimensions and talk a lot about spirits journeying through alternative spaces.

(Translated from French)