Let this suffocation stop
of breathing with a foreign lung!
-Rosario Castellanos
This is a request for all women: don’t be afraid to shine. The words of Mexican actress Karina Gidi could not be more congruent in times like these, nor more honest when she is asked about the film in which she plays Rosario Castellanos: Los adioses.
Those who already had the fortune of seeing the film before its official premiere (this August 24) have risked saying that Goodbyes is a visual poem dedicated to all women, to the eternal feminine, but also to all men who want to open their consciousness a little more.
The film directed by Natalia Beristáin It is an offering to the life – to the intimacy – of a woman who made history in Latin America, and who still seems very familiar to us today: Rosario Castellanos.
Many of us have heard her name, but few of us know how deep, brave, corny, often stormy and above all fair the pen of this is, a Mexican writer who was not afraid to point out the feminine world that for the majority, including great intellectuals of his time and ours, was or is non-existent.
Castellanos was a poet, teacher, diplomat and . During his youth he did not hesitate to work and inspire his works in favor of the less privileged strata, specifically those and the figure of women. So we could affirm with complete certainty that we are facing a feminist writer –the first in Mexico– who was also in charge of educating several generations during her years as a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, among others in the United States.
The nostalgic (and admirable) thing about being a woman
Women have to raise their consciousness and recognize their identity in order to change their reality. That was the premise that Castellanos carried with him and that has been perfectly illustrated in The goodbyesa film piece of new Mexican cinema, where we can observe, intertwined, two of the most important stages in her life: her youth, when she began to write, and her maturity, with the voice of a consolidated woman.
The Goodbyes is not a replica of this writer’s life. Quite the contrary, it is a film that puts pins in every fundamental part in the life of a very human woman; for example, the relationship –as passionate as it is catastrophic–, the mental demons of a self-reinforcing depression, success, marginalization (mainly by her husband), the ironclad act of obstinacy for writing and for being mother; femininity.
So in this film, which you will be able to see very soon in Cinépolis theaters, you will not find the square biography of a character, nor a feminism without foundations… This is an invitation for women not to be afraid to decide about their destiny; a countercultural film, and an act from times where the feminine (whether you are a man or a woman) has not yet been able to be valued in you.