Shadow Girl

Chile

Maria Teresa Larrain

Shadow Girl is an intimate first-person film by Chilean-born filmmaker María Teresa Larraín. It follows her journey as she suddenly starts losing her vision and grapples with her new reality as a filmmaker who is irreversibly losing her sight. In creating this work, María Teresa uses the dislocation and loss of identity she confronts as the emotional springboard to create a lyrical tone poem at once accessible and very human. Shadow Girl begins with the filmmaker's private despair, loneliness and ‘shame’ and follows the events and struggles that bring her to a more hopeful, socially engaged and defiant outlook. While following the dramatic arc of María Teresa’s personal story, the film also offers the viewer a window into her creative process and her transition from a sighted to a blind filmmaker.

In Shadow Girl, the viewer becomes María Teresa’s companion as she travels between Toronto and Santiago, the two cities she calls home. The filmmaker’s storytelling devices include ‘the blind gaze’ and the crossing of the bridge that symbolizes the separation of the sighted world from that of the blind. The film also explores the relationship between sound and memory, central elements in María Teresa's work. Shot with two cameras depicting both a subjective and an objective point of view, Shadow Girl provides the blind characters with a rare opportunity seldom granted in film to the disabled: that of looking back, returning the spectator's gaze.

In Toronto after she begins losing her sight, she is denied disability benefits by the Canadian government. Without any other means of support she begins to slip into poverty. Encouraged by her large family, who all support her in her time of need, she goes back to her native Santiago which she had fled at the height of the Pinochet dictatorship.

On Santiago's main commercial street María Teresa meets a group of blind street vendors who are fighting for the right to continue to sell their wares, which is their sole means of support. The bond she forms with this tight-knit community fundamentally changes her understanding of what it means to live as a blind person, and starts her on a journey of empowerment and transformation. Their dignity and determination inspire her to use her skills as a filmmaker and bring their stories to a wider audience. The idea of a blind filmmaker is an oxymoron at first, but as María Teresa begins to reclaim her voice, she redefines filmmaking on her own terms.

As the street vendors embrace her and she becomes part of their lives, María Teresa experiences another type of transformation. As she walks the streets of her childhood and reconnects with her family, she starts to build a new identity and find a new path in life. Through her aging mother, who has also gone blind, she learns how to balance relying on others while maintaining her independence. Most surprisingly, in their innocence, her young granddaughters teach her that blindness is just another way of being.

Maria Teresa Larrain

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trigon-film

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