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Kim Torres's Bid to Speak About Feminicides in SI NO ARDEMOS, CÓMO ILUMINAR LA NOCHE

Sofía Alvarado

Si no ardemos, cómo iluminar la noche by Kim Torres, part of the Mexican Feature Film Section, premiered at the 23rd Morelia International Film Festival (FICM).

The film tells the story of Laura, a thirteen-year-old who feels trapped in her new family in a new place she has to adapt to. Surrounded by vast forests and palm plantations, the town hides the secret of a beast that devours women.

With this story, Kim Torres talks about the search for the expression of pain through her work, as well as the bonds that resist violence against women.

The director explained that this project “was a bid to talk about something so hard from a place of light” and from the point of view of a girl who does not fully understand what is happening around her.

In the mixture of the film's rarefied atmosphere intertwined with the legends of a place, the director added that she was interested in showing how “so many things are disguised in a softened or distorted version of reality. It’s a way of conveying knowledge without speaking in such a crude way, but there is a cover-up of violence within that.” 

What he wanted to do was play with genre and create an unsettling atmosphere, an altered reality, without reaching magical realism, as she was interested in a childhood perspective.

The film was shot in the South Pacific region of Costa Rica, where she grew up, and which was the ideal setting for the atmosphere. She also mentioned a woman was murdered last year in the exact location where the film was shot, which she feels is symbolic of the violence perpetrated against women.