Development
Project title: Guía de Confección sin Patrón
English Title: Wounds Sewing Patterns
Director: Carmen Menéndez
Production: Anna Giralt Gris (Gusano Films)
Screenplay: Carmen Menéndez
Production company: Gusano Films
Duration (estimated): 90′
Genre: Creation documentary
Budget: €227,000
NEEDS / OBJECTIVES:
The film is currently in the development phase. We have mentoring from the CIMA Impulsa program. We want to apply for production funds next year and also apply to markets to seek pre-sales and antenna rights on television. We are currently looking for distribution and a co-production in Asturias that can help us raise part of the production and work with a local team. Likewise, the process of the film itself is presented as an action to reclaim the memory of the city, so building bridges with social actors and opening the project to participation is key.
SYNOPSIS:
In Gijón, the former workers of IKE, one of the most famous men’s shirt companies in the middle of the Franco regime, keep open the wound of their 10 years of strikes and 4 years of confinement in the building: they did not recover the jobs for which they fought and they were never asked for a public apology. Seeing them relive their protest from 30 years ago in the streets, the working women of today’s city will connect their problems with those of those workers who, in the midst of the Industrial Reconversion of the 90s, learned to make barricades, occupied a merchant ship and they came to stand for election.
NOTE OF INTENTION:
This film talks about how society, historically, has given little space to women to be aware that they can defend themselves. The IKE workers represented a dysfunction. They broke the pattern of behavior that had been imposed on them and took their own into the public space, based on the defense of the companions they had next to them. Reconnecting the city with the memory of the former IKE workers amplifies the capacity for action of the entire community, of those of us who have the future in our hands. The idea is to take the memory from their minds and transfer it to the public space of today’s Gijón – a city whose industrial fabric disintegrated during the time of those protests – to contrast them and connect them to the working women of today, and occupy, through cinema, the streets again.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE DIRECTOR:
Carmen Menéndez (Gijón, 1986). Her first short film, No Jungle, shows the experience of Syrian refugees trying to reach England. Present in more than 20 national and international festivals, it premiered in the Official Section of the Malaga Film Festival and received the Best Filmmaker award from the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media (CIMA). She is also an editor of documentary and video art (a regular collaborator with the artist Rosana Antolí, with pieces such as The Immortal Jellyfish for the Tate Modern in London). The use of found footage is one of the centers of her practice, with pieces such as Is This Human? for the CCCB, on the manipulation of perception in far-right discourses.
Contact: Carmen Menendez
Email: carmenendezz@gmail.com
Telephone: 695 535 134