Memories of a Burning Body is an incredibly moving, candid docufiction about older women’s sexuality, directed by award-winning Antonella Sudasassi Furniss.
Sexual Healing
by Alexa DalbyMemories of a Burning Body
[rating=4]
CAUTION: Here be spoilers
Watch this and weep for women’s lives, as many in the audience did at a screening. Memories of a Burning Body is an incredibly moving docufiction. You may think it is set in Costa Rica in the past and it couldn’t happen here. Yet it did and it still does.
Talented first-feature director Antonella Sudasassi Furniss (this film won her the Panorama Audience Award for Best Feature Film in Berlin earlier this year) has interwoven the very frank audio testimonies of three women in their 60s and 70s (Ana, Patricia and Mayela) and kept them only as audio to preserve their anonymity. Visually, the three are combined and personified in the body of one woman (actress Sol Carballo). We see this elderly woman pottering around her old-fashioned flat without speaking (she echoes the words on the audio occasionally) as we hear the voices of the women tell the stories of their lives, intercut with imagined, dramatised episodes.
The three understated voices follow the lives of Ana, Patricia and Mayela (portrayed in flashbacks as young women/girls by Paulina Bernini Viquez and Juliana Filloy Bogantes) from sexual abuse in girlhood, growing up ignorant of sex, rape in marriage, domestic violence, babies, divorce, into the freedom to be themselves they eventually found in older age. Knowledge and enjoyment of sex was taboo for women in their society when they were young.
Burning Body in the title has no easy English translation. It refers to the burning desire of sexuality that these women discovered late, but not too late, in life. So the film is both fascinating and inspirational.
Memories of a Burning Body won the Audience Award at the Berlinale and is released on 15 November 2024 in the UK.
