Maids

The very short piece (5 minutes long) promotes the creative junction of video, dance, film, theatre and radio. Therefore, multiplicity appears at every moment, breathes in every image, cannonades the sensible audience who must picture all feelings and sensations in every frame, guided by the dramatic voices coming from the radio which tries to rescue its now forgotten soap operas. It is inside the mind of this Maid who cleans an infinite room that the mental imagery bursts out. Her body, and mostly her face, expresses her changing emotional states, thus connecting all possible stories, The Story, about the love affair resonating within the walls of one circular travelling shot.

Maids was created with the main purpose of exploring the concept of limits. The Maid, not unlike any of us, is torn between her endless imagination and her condition as a “real” being, fighting with the restrains of her own body. This notion run throughout all the making of this film; cinematography, sound, acting, art direction; all borders that separate what is, and is, not real.

The dancer embodies this concept. As a result she staggers with a color-blasting unstoppable energy around what resembles a stereotypical study, with unmovable, well-defined, everlasting furniture. Very much like a Franz Kline painting, her abstract movement conveys this violent, internal struggle. And yet, she smiles. Just like a Monterroso’s character, she finds the idea of her own prison sentence amusing, to be trapped within this time and space and within her own self is delightful if only, the way it has happened with generations before ours, she gets on time to hear her soap opera once more.

On this note, the movie was built around a soap opera for a number of reasons. Generations of latin-american families have gathered silent around radios (and televisions), building for ages what is still seen as the stereotypical “Latin Macho” and his hopeless lady in need. Maids was actually choreographed and written using these images, present even in european romanticism and classic opera, and even roman sculptures before that. The Maid dances, for a few minutes, with the burden of ages through ages of of western civilization for Man and Woman to act upon her. At the end, she frees herself and accomplishes to become either one.

This is Sofia Castro's first short film as a student of Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires (FUC). Julieta Ferraro, who specialized on experimental dance and physical theater at the Kim Physical Theatre in Berlin, Germany, achieved with her a hypnotizing performance, that goes beyond classic representation of the female character.