14/12/2023 - Alba Cros and Nora Haddad direct a beautiful and honest documentary about the different ways of understanding and living lesbianism

"Our desire does not know the law of the world, and by the time it learns it, it has already forgetten it. Clarity was imposed on us, and yet we continue to grow in mystery", says a voiceover reciting a text by the writer Sara Torres inspired by fragments of Sappho and Maria Mercè Marçal in the prologue of Otherness. The documentary is directed and written by Alba Cros and Nora Haddad, and was presented at the Malaga Festival and the D'A Film Festival in Barcelona, which Noucinemart is releasing in Spanish cinemas on Friday 15 December.

In the documentary, several lesbian couples from different backgrounds, conditions and generations living in Catalonia stand before Cros and Haddad's camera to share their experiences, their different ways of understanding and living lesbianism. We are participants in their stories and from there a whole journey of lives is reflected that help us to understand what it means to live this dissidence in a structurally heterosexual and normative world. The protagonists discuss their different intimate experiences of love, friendship, desire, sexuality and the body, their fears and insecurities, the stigmas and prejudices they had to face when coming out (many of them still present). Also, of the prejudices within the lesbian community itself, of the burden of legacy, the social environment and the gaze of the other, of their ideas of family, of the need for a vocabulary to name and define themselves beyond the normative and binary.

All this is narrated with simplicity, care and sincerity, through the different testimonies and the everyday life of these protagonists, allowing them to speak and express themselves through the free narration of their intimacy. While we listen to their life stories and their ideas about their sexuality and relationships, in the documentary we also see their daily lives. We see them going about their regular tasks and routines in their different environments, eating, driving, at their workplaces and in their free time. By reflecting the diversity within lesbianism, the directors manage to move away from the cliché, to show the complexity and freedom of the non-normative beyond easy labels, that there is not only one way of being and living as a lesbian.

This simplicity and appropriate distance in narrating the protagonists’ stories comes with an interesting personal style that stands out in the film's prologue and epilogue. The moving image of the sea and sea caves provides a symbol of the refuge where otherness can exist freely, apart from the normative world. While the voice-over recites Sara Torres' texts (evoking other lesbian literature) and the music of Nora Haddad herself in collaboration with Maria Arnal gives the narration a mysterious and poetic touch. A magical and singular beauty that reaches its greatest strength in the scene of the nocturnal coven, a beautiful tribute to another lesbian fiction, Portrait of a Lady on Fire [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Céline Sciamma
film profile], by Céline Sciamma.

Otherness is an emotional and honest documentary about the construction of a lesbian, open identity outside the normative. It dares to tell the story of lesbianism from the viewpoint of freedom and diversity, and in doing so, it manages to truthfully represent its different experiences, forms and possibilities.

Otherness is a production by the company Amor y Lujo and The Open Reel will managed its international sales.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)