These Women Directors Are Elevating Coming-of-Age Movies

Our seventh newsletter comes from writer Tiffany Vazquez. This week, she spotlights three movies united by a common thread: young women at their center and women behind the camera. The selections span Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico, offering three distinct perspectives from across Latin America.

Tiffany recommends a film playing in theaters and another to stream at home, and then sits down with Fernanda Tovar, director of “Chicas Tristes” ("Sad Girlz"), for an interview. The Mexico City-set coming-of-age drama premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in June.

Happy Watching,

— Vanessa

In Lorena Alvarado's latest film, a young Venezuelan woman named Ena returns to Caracas after years of traveling abroad. While dealing with the emotional weight of her grandmother’s memory loss, she finds a postcard hidden in the shelves of her father’s bookstore. This leads her on a journey that showcases Alvarado’s talent for beautifully portraying the complex aspects of family, memory, history, and truth.

Opening at IFC Center in New York on July 24, with additional cities to follow.

Colombian director Lina Rodriguez’s “Señoritas” follows Alejandra, a young woman living a seemingly normal life in Bogotá. We see Alejandra in her daily routines, and even though the camera stays close to everything she does, we still find her deeply mysterious. This minimal filmmaking by Rodriguez is both restrained and evokes a spirit of independence that still feels impactful thirteen years after its premiere.

Streaming on Criterion Channel.

— By Tiffany Vazquez

“Chicas Tristes” (“Sad Girlz”), the first feature-length film by Fernanda Tovar, follows two best friends in Mexico City, teenagers Paola and Maestra, who are attached at the hip. They take community dance lessons together, have sleepovers, chill on rooftops, and most prominently, swim on their school’s team together, hoping to attend a competition in Brazil. Their bond is tested after a traumatic event happens to Paola, and Maestra struggles to right the wrongs that have been committed.

With meditative shots of mirrors reflecting both whole and fractured images, bodies in water searching for flight, and crowds wistfully witnessing a solar eclipse, “Sad Girlz” balances serious tones while maintaining the vibrancy needed to accurately portray everyday life in Mexico City. While this is Fernanda Tovar’s feature debut, she has been directing for about ten years and is a member of Colectivo Colmena, a Mexico City-based collective founded on the importance of collaboration and commitment to “bold, sensitive, and profoundly human narratives.”

The coming-of-age drama premiered at the Berlinale in February, where it won two awards, including the Crystal Bear. It also screened at last month’s Tribeca Film Festival, where we had the pleasure of speaking with Tovar about her impressive debut. We discuss some of Tovar’s influences, visual motifs in her movie, and how the specificity of Bad Bunny’s album inspired her to do the same through her work.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I’m sure everyone who has seen “Sad Girlz” is convinced the leads, Rocío Guzmán and Darana Álvarez, had actually grown up as best friends. Did they have a lot of time to get to know each other beforehand?

FT: We had a lot of time because they actually were terrible swimmers, so they had to go to swimming classes for three months before we started shooting. So they started going to these classes three times a week, and then two months before shooting, we started an acting workshop where we played games and did improv, so they were sharing three days of their week [with each other]. I realized it was going okay because they started talking about stuff where I was like, “when did that happen?” and they were like, “oh last night we went to see a film,” and I was like, “okay, great!” And they became really good friends. It was a nice way for fiction to permeate real life after the film.

What other movies or directors influenced “Sad Girlz?” I definitely thought about Sofia Coppola a lot.

FT: Sofia Coppola, yes. Also Lucrecia Martel. Also Céline Sciamma with “Water Lilies;” that was a very big reference. I also remember this film “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.” They’re not friends; they’re cousins [in that movie], but it’s also this relationship put under pressure because of something [similar]. I feel like every film I saw before shooting “Chicas Tristes” kind of shaped it and brought it together.

There are lots of underwater shots in your movie. Some of those swimming scenes look like the characters are flying. Could you talk more about the parallels between sky and water, reflections in water, and the use of mirrors and windows?

FT: One is a reflection of the other, and in the beginning of the film [the girls] are in like perfect synchronicity, but after everything happens, they start to not be in sync anymore because they don’t think or feel the same way, so I wanted this disagreement to be portrayed in a way that was not verbal, so the mirrors gave that to the film; the ability to be the reflection of the other and how that [can be] broken…and the mirrors looking at the sky is asking for a supernatural intervention, and the sky is a reflection of the water, so I wanted to feel that when they are swimming, they are kind of flying, and to have these parallels [with] the water being a space of connection and the sky being a place of reflection.

There are scenes that beautifully depict how in-between childhood and adulthood Paola and Maestra are, like when they are playing with sidewalk chalk while hungover. There are contradictory moments when they do childlike things while more adult matters are discussed, and I wonder if that also speaks to the reflections and duality.