THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
Andrés Peyrot’s first film is backed by another, a ghost documentary that haunts its characters: in 1975, the French explorer Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau (Oscar-winning in 1961 for his documentary Sky and Mud) goes to Panama to film the Kuna community, a Native American people living in the Kuna Yala archipelago, along the country’s Caribbean coast. With his wife and child, the man settled there for more than a year, finding what his eye as a Western ethnographer had come to look for: a “primitive” way of life protected from modernity, strange rituals on which is based on this matrilocal community. His journey will result in a film, God is a womanbut a financial turmoil caused it to disappear from circulation.
Nearly fifty years later, Andrés Peyrot went to the village of Ustupu, where the memory of this visit remains vivid. Old and young, everyone knows about the existence of the film they dream of seeing shown; it’s a piece of their history, if not of themselves. Peyrot leads the investigation, closely following a magnificent character, the poet and psycholinguist Arysteides Turpana, conscience of his community and central figure of the documentary – he died of Covid-19 in 2020, leaving the story orphaned by its hero.
But the portrait that paints God is a woman is first and foremost collective. It is that of a community of indigenous people politically organized and largely aware of what, in 1975, the explorer had come looking for: the fantasy of a virgin corner of the world, untainted by the hand of progress. At the risk of some accommodation with reality, some remembering that Gaisseau did not want to see plastic bottles appear in the field of the camera: “Anything reminiscent of the West had no value for Pierre. »
Crazy dreams
By relying on living matter, God is a woman operates a shift in perspective on an entire corpus of ethnographic works. Behind the scientific approach lay the crazy dreams of their authors, their thirst for Eden. Despite the falsification, the disappearance of the copy is equivalent, for the Kuna, to the loss of a limb, an amputation. As if, to consolidate, their identity needed to incorporate the gaze of the foreigner: “How do others see us? How do we see ourselves? » It’s there that God is a woman avoids the pitfall that presented itself to him: criticism, fifty years later, of Gaisseau’s gesture would be too easy. It is more for Peyrot to take him back, to follow in his footsteps and, above all, to capture the moment when the Kuna seize a camera to film themselves – this is where the Kuna should logically end up. the story, and it is at this moment that he gets a little tripped up in his desire to complete the story by succumbing to the artifice of a happy ending.
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