Isabelle Solas's Our Bodies Are Your Battlefields is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries starting June 22, 2022 in the series Viewfinder.
I’ve always been intrigued by identity issues since they often lead to conflict, violence, and sometimes war. It seems to me that being interested in the construction of gender identity allows me to narrate intense life trajectories where desire, invention, and creation are the main driving forces of people.
I wanted to go and meet the Argentinian trans community at a moment when I was wondering if being a woman was an identity, for me, and how I could feel free within this category. I was immersed in trans feminist readings, worried about the violence of the world, and observing the absurdity of the French protest movement “La Manif pour tous,” which seemed to believe that access to parental rights for homosexual couples was going to “degenerate” the world and lead it to its demise.
I heard about an Argentinian movement that had succeeded in passing the Gender Identity Law in 2012, a law that declared that sex and gender are two distinct things and that people are free to determine their gender identity without having to justify it to the state. By meeting this struggle and these activists, I felt that they brought me much more than I had imagined, bearing an intransigent glance of the world.
The film was made to celebrate the importance of the collective. I wanted to cut off stereotypical representations of trans people in cinema who are very often portrayed as alone, victimized, or glorified as stars. My purpose was to show how trans people’s experiences are anything but “character development.” I wanted people to discover this nebula of activists from the interwoven portraits of two women from this movement, Claudia and Violeta. They make us enter this political and sensitive “world,” each in a very particular way. For many reasons, we hardly ever see them on screen together because even if they have the same enemies, like the patriarchy in the first place, they are in very different theoretical and concrete places. Ethnicity, social class, and their ways of thinking about politics, all of these elements are in opposition. That’s why the film is built as an echo, complementing each other, focusing on the intimacy of the two protagonists.
We worked together in a double process. I followed the activist life—the demonstrations, the nonprofit organization’s meetings, the lectures given by Violeta—in the tradition of direct cinema, seeking to catch the richness of the faces and the dialectic. The commitment to the rights of the community seemed to be transcended by anti-capitalist and anti-racist concerns. Everything was linked in a coherent way. It was obvious that they were at the intersection of these power dynamics and, therefore, in the right place to dismantle them all.
Then, we worked differently for the other part of the film. To put into images the idea that intimacy is at the core of their struggles, I suggested that they build scenes together to paint their own portraits. In other words, we dropped the direct cinema in a series of planned scenes with their close relations and the collective’s members, by assuming a staging more distant from reality. I wanted to use shot/reverse shot, and I was able to do it more often with this configuration. I made them repeat their sentences to find the right frame that would correspond. We knew in advance that I wanted the scene to “narrate” and they had a sort of score that they played as they wished, invoking memories, stories, dialogues… They took this way of making cinema as if it was a game, becoming the actresses of their own life. I wanted to make a popular film that carries a complex way of thinking; I felt that this way of filming would allow a large audience to immerse themselves in their lives, which cannot be compared unfavorably to the destinies of fictional heroines.
The film’s editing has a sustained rhythm to anchor the story in a powerful and energetic movement, which keeps moving forward. This is certainly a way to follow Claudia’s path, this quick-witted and exacting woman who doesn't let herself be held back by anything. Introspection and poetry find their place in the film through the unsaid words of Violeta, her way of breathing and observing the world. She gives us access to her dreams. The two protagonists give the film its rhythm.
The film’s title reminds us of the omnipresence of violence in trans destinies. The bodies of murdered trans people are found burnt, lacerated, mutilated as on a battlefield. Often, the murders of transwomen tell us the same story, that of heterosexual men gripped by desire for these women, who “repent” and kill the source of their desires rather than assume it. The title also implies that the “trans issue” only exists in a cisgender world. The topic remains a passionate debate for people who are not trans. It was difficult to talk about this violence in the film, to make it exist because it is a blind spot, something difficult to show on the screen. I filmed women who died at the police station, Claudia herself received death threats, and yet I was not able to relate these major events in the film. Everything I tried to stage to tell these tragedies did not work. However, from this pitfall emerged the film’s atmosphere, because even if violence and death lurk, we still come out with the desire to set ourselves in movement, to approach people.
Violence is everywhere but it should not reduce the meaning of their struggle. I didn’t film victims, but rather avant-gardists of a less absurd world. Of course, they resist this violence, but above all they re-enchant the world, inviting us to rethink it. It is this creative energy that I wanted to show through images so that it becomes contagious.