"Cops, be listening, your daughter’s out here fighting!" The chants of thousands of feminists who took to the streets in Mexico City on international women’s day 2021 can be heard loud and clear in Dora Garciá’s rallying cry of a film, demanding justice for the women and trans people of Mexico. Weaved beautifully into these scenes of collective resistance are ones of individual creativity as in parallel we get to meet trans artist La Bruja de Texcoco as she composes a soundtrack for the movement, a musical imagining of liberation.
About this film, filmmaker/artist Dora García writes:
The inspiration and point of departure of this film is an old song, written in 1930 by German composer Friedrich Holländer: "Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte". This song, translated into Spanish as "Si pudiera desear algo" (If I Could Wish for Something), has been in my memory for as long as I can remember.
It expresses poetically a very complex concept: that the disappointment of women has been going on for so long, the promise made to them by the revolution has remained for so long unfulfilled, delayed, negated, that the sadness, the vulnerability derived from this feeling of abandonment has been turned into a shelter and a shield, perhaps even a sword. In sadness, we overcome the temptation to feel victimised and instead use pain as a conduit to recognize another’s suffering, opening the possibility for an encounter with other struggles.
With this in mind, I wanted to create a contemporary equivalent of the old song, that could function as a soundtrack to the incredible feminist demonstrations that have been taking place – modifying and appropriating public space and public discourse – in the city of Mexico in the last 5 years.
The film follows two paths: one, a collective recollection of images and sounds from these feminist marches in Mexico City; two, the composition, recording and final performance of the film theme song by trans artist La Bruja de Texcoco.
