26/06/2024 - Mexican director Julia Tostado recontextualises a 17th-century folk legend to convey a modern feminist message using authentic natural materials in the short film animation process

To Be a Seed, a movie directed by Mexican choreographer and animation director Julia Tostado which screened in Animafest Zagreb’s Student Competition, charms the audience from its very first moments. This dialogue-free short film begins with a woman singing sweetly and proceeds to create a world in which spiritual female qualities and the beauty of nature combine through a compelling drawing style and enchanting sound design.

A woman performs a sinuous dance in a lush forest, freely turning into a bird and back again, creating a sense of interconnectedness with the earth, the forest and the sky. But this visual fluidity suddenly vanishes when the woman is captured in a net by a male figure. Trees turn into sand and the film’s gentle colours shift towards a gloomy sepia tone. The initial tranquillity transforms into a painful need to escape from violence and power.

The film is inspired by a 17th-century Mexican folk legend, “La Mulata de Córdoba”, which tells the story of a healer-woman who was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned by the Inquisition. Tostado’s film recontextualises this specific tragedy into the collective fear of women and the constant threat of violence they still face in Latin America to this day.

Tostado’s approach to watercolour hand-drawing included extracting colour pigments from avocado seeds, black beans and red cabbage. In this sense, she derives her poetic expression from natural materials inherent to Mexico, which also carry strong symbolic meaning in the Mayan culture. Similarly, sand and coffee are used to create the film’s extraordinary textures, making a clear environmental statement. The film’s feminist message is loud and clear, celebrating women’s voices which unite and stand together for all those who have gone missing, suffered repression and died at the hands of colonisers…who are always men.

To be a Seed is a poetic take on the long and brutal history of the abuse of women, telling an authentic, local, but also universal story, whose relatability extends far beyond Latin America.