29/10/2024 - The Colombian director talks about her documentary, in which she asks why her grandmother received a lobotomy, exploring the psychiatry and society of that time

Colombian director Catalina Villar talks about her documentary Ana Rosa [+see also:
interview: Catalina Villar
film profile], in which she asks why her grandmother received a lobotomy, exploring the psychiatry and society of that time. The film was awarded in last year's Cinéma du Réel in Paris, where it was world-premiered (read news).

Cineuropa: How did it feel to find your grandmother Ana Rosa's identity card, and how did this change your outlook on her family and background?
Catalina Villar: The first question that came to my mind is why she was never talked about. The second is why, having studied medicine and having wanted to be a psychiatrist, knowing that she had had a lobotomy, it had never resonated with me. That’s what family secrets are like, sometimes they are right in front of us and we don't see them. We weren’t told about it. Was it to protect us from pain? Or was it to protect us from society?

I didn't think of a film at the time. I just wanted to understand who my grandmother was and why they they did what they did to her. It was terrible for me to see the name of my uncle, who I admired so much, as part of the whole thing. However, I understood that my uncle was not a "bad guy", but that psychiatry was part of the society of the time. It was psychiatrists who helped society to maintain standards but they also received all the “trash” that society throws out. The most painful thing was that it was her own son who allowed her to have a lobotomy. It must have been for him too, and I would like to think that this is why he later became so anti-psychiatry and fought so hard for women, homosexuals and children. It was only when I found out that 85% of lobotomies in the world were done on women that I felt that Ana Rosa would let me to talk about many women, and ask why it was particularly done on them. And that justified making a film.

In the film you explore the relationship between psychiatry and social control over women's bodies in the 1950s. What did you discover about the history of psychiatry in Colombia and its role in the family stories in your country?
Colombian psychiatry mirrors that of the world. It adapted the hygienist and racist theories of the 1930s to pass judgement on indigenous people and peasants. Most of all, I understood that there were differences in what was considered pathological in a woman and what was considered pathological in a man. It is hard to access the medical files written by the asylum psychiatrists in Colombia: the institutions that keep them today say they are protect the women's privacy, but the truth is that these records were found rotting away in Sibaté (the psychiatric hospital I filmed at) and were preserved thanks to the insistence of a group of researchers. So it is more likely that they are hiding how they treated people.

Most men's case histories describe how they arrived there after a “public issue” and were brought in by the police. But most of the women were brought in by members of their families, mostly their husbands, but also fathers and sons. What you can see overall that there are aggravating factors that don’t apply to men (“she dresses badly” “she is 30 and still not married”) or anything to do with sexual pleasure (masturbation was much more serious in women).

How did you go about collecting interviews and accessing such personal, but also historic files? Were there any revelations that particularly surprised during filming?
This journey was both thrilling and terrible. Thanks to my Colombian producer, I was able to consult the Colombian film archives quite easily. It was shocking to see images of what I had already read about in many testimonies: an inhumane asylum with women (and men) treated like animals. I was allowed into the public library and the medical library at Washington Hospital. There is an immense treasure trove there. Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman - who popularised the lobotomy - kept papers and footage taken before, during and after the procedure. I was shocked by many of them, but the one that surprised me the most is the one in the film. He actually created his own “educational” film showing how a lobotomised women was better because she was now a “good housewife”. The question grew wider: “What does it mean to “cure” someone in psychiatry?

I went back through the family archives. It is like putting on new glasses to reread the legend. What is left today, after my family were all worried that I was going to “wash our dirty laundry in public”, is that we can talk more openly about what we feel, and we all talk about Ana Rosa as if we had met her...

(Translated from Spanish by Alexandra Stephens)