film interview

HELENA: After my work on the film "Emerging Woman" (an historical documentary on U.S. women - see oob, march '74 -ed.), I felt a need for a film with an analysis of the situation of Third World women. I'd always heard this silly idea that you can't talk about feminism in Latin America because the question there is of survival. But this tries to split women: "are you political or are you a feminist?" This shouldn't be a contradiction. The important thing is to make an analysis deep enough showing how you still have feminist questions in Latin America, but with a political approach. [MELANIE]: One way I feel we are, is that within the IWFP we all get paid the same salary for a day's work, whether it's for direction, assistant editing, or research. When we hire someone to do some typing or translation work we also pay them that same rate. We're trying to take into consideration that often different class backgrounds afford different educational opportunities for gaining certain skills. But we feel everyone's work is equally necessary to the project. However, I should say that the people who aren't in IWFP that were hired for the film crew and editing were paid the going film rates, which are higher than our pay. HELENA: Until the day we left, we couldn't find a camerawoman. We hired Christina without seeing her. The first time I met her was when she got off the plane in Mexico to work with us. I felt very unsafe not knowing a person. Even if she'd sent some films of her work I couldn't be sure of how we would work together. Alfonso came along because I knew him for many years, and knew his work in films in Latin America. Although he was with us everywhere, we put him out when we wanted to be with just the women. Christina would do the camerawork, which was excellent.