12/11/2024 - The Spanish artist and filmmaker unpicks her Visions du Réel-awarded film, which draws parallels between Russian historical figure Alexandra Kollontai and contemporary Mexican struggles

Spanish artist Dora García has presented the Spanish premiere of her latest documentary, (Revolution, Fulfil Your Promise) Red Love [+see also:
film review
interview: Dora García
film profile], at Zinebi after it won a Special Mention at Visions du Réel earlier this year. We sat down with her to delve into her fascination for Russian revolutionary and diplomat Alexandra Kollontai, and how she went about drawing parallels between her and modern-day feminist and trans struggles in Mexico.

Cineuropa: How did you first become aware of Alexandra Kollontai? And where did the idea come from to use modern feminist struggles to approach this historical figure?
Dora García: I was aware of Kollontai due to my teenage activism, but I had never read her works. This film happened thanks to an invitation I got from Stockholm. There’s an art school there that decided to devote a year to Kollontai. They usually invite a visual artist to accompany them and make an exhibition together with them. So, thanks to a previous work I did, they thought I was the right person for this. I spent a year with them, reading Kollontai, and through this year I became curious about the various different translations of Kollontai into Spanish. I saw that these translations coincided with the different waves of feminism, and I also saw that it was being translated again at that time. It’s like there is this occasional resurrection of Kollontai.

Some of her concepts are reflected in the fourth wave of feminism, which in Spain was very strong especially around 2018, when I started to work on this. There are several relevant concepts, but perhaps one of the strongest in the fourth wave is that of “love-comradeship”, which means the dismissal of romantic love and the idea that love is a political force that should be channelled into the community.

The close-up scene of the trans woman, La Javi, explaining a traumatic episode in her life to the members of the commune is heart-breaking. Could you tell us more about this group of people and the activities they engage in?
The structure of their conversation is called a consciousness-raising session, which is a classic feminist structure. You have certain texts that you read, and you also have to share something personal, so there’s a kind of protocol, and that’s what we did. The people who were invited to that session were mostly individuals from the commune, as well as people the commune decided to invite. So actually, I didn’t know La Javi before that day.

However, this was a separatist group, and males cannot enter that commune. My main camera operator is a man, so from the beginning, we started to have a female crew and a male crew, because there were a lot of places where the males couldn’t go. Miriam Ortiz was the person behind the camera when we filmed La Javi. Miriam and La Javi knew each other and belonged to the same group, so there was this trust between them, which made it possible to shoot that scene.

Did you encounter any resistance from the Russian archives?
When we visited Moscow, it was a different time because it was pre-pandemic and before the war. It was very Western. I had a grant from Garage, a big contemporary arts centre that has a research department, and thanks to that, I was able to find all those documents. This department has very competent people working there, and they were the ones who found all these documents and prepared them for me. Anything was possible in Moscow at that time, for a price. It was expensive, so we paid maybe €3 per second of footage. They provided the money for that.

The mood changes drastically towards the end, when La Bruja de Texcoco and her song come to the fore. Was your intention to end the film on a lighter note?
Yes, of course. For my previous film If I Could Wish for Something, La Bruja got a commission to make a Mexican version of this old song by Friedrich Hollaender, which is a song I had in mind all the time while working on the movie. I wanted it to be like the theme song, but up until the last minute, we couldn’t find out who owned the rights to it, and we didn’t want to get into trouble. There was a suggestion from the Mexican team to have a Mexican artist make a version of the song, and it ended up being La Bruja. In the beginning, the idea was that she would compose the song and sing it, but she took up more and more space in the film.

It’s absolutely a trans-inclusive film, so it was important to have La Bruja in there, and also to have La Bruja in an extremely female atmosphere in which you can see the love that this community feels for her – it’s sheer devotion. Apart from the song, the beauty and how photogenic she looks, it’s also the idea that trans women are not a threat – they have never been a threat, and it’s such bullshit to think they are.