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Screening of Plaza de la Soledad at Sundance

The last screening of Mexican photographer and director Maya Goded’s Plaza de la Soledad at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival was attended by Mexican actor and director Diego Luna, FICM Director Daniela Michel, and FICM President Alejandro Ramírez Magaña. All three were impressed by the quality of the work, the originality of the images, and the humanity with which Goded approaches her female subjects, all of whom are sex-workers.

Plaza de la Soledad is Goded’s first film, one that she hoped would act as a mirror in which the film’s subjects could see themselves as they truly are. “I wanted them to be moved, I wanted them to cry when they saw themselves”, she said. The documentary presents the daily lives of the women without prejudice or sentimentality, offering a humane vision that is at once recognizable and universal.

Sundance-Plaza Leonardo Heiblum, Martha Sosa and Maya Goded.

The film has garnered a positive reception from the US press. On Film Stage, Daniel Schindel noted: “Some docs observe. This one listens”. It is an original documentary, one that reworks the traditional ‘gaze’ inherent in films about prostitutes, viewing them as equals, without distance or sentimentality. It is a complex and disturbing portrait of the life and decline of women who come to discover that their work is not their destiny. “I see it as a dialogue between myself and the women – I had some things in mind for them, then I realized that they had things to tell me without me having to intervene”, said Goded.

In this vivid and colorful portrait, Goded accompanies a group of women whose most intimate moments are defined by a fierce independence; women who are able to truly recognize themselves onscreen. It is a dignified exploration of a reality that may seem remote, but that is in fact marked by a loneliness that all of us can recognize.