Como Si La Tierra Se Las Hubiera Tragado: Being a Woman
by Aayushi A.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
The description on the Sundance website for this animated short reads: “Olivia, a young woman living abroad, returns to her hometown in Mexico in the hope of reconnecting with her past.” Expecting an unassuming study of diasporic identity, I clicked play. Little did I know that I would instead find a searing and discomfiting study of what it means to occupy space as a woman, specifically in Mexico.
The short opens to Olivia sitting in a bus surrounded by the ambient sounds of traffic. The greyscale switches to a warm palette with a flashback of a memory from her childhood—her mom braiding her hair and telling her, “A pretty girl like you, they’ll eat you up.” A fairly innocent comment, it came sharply to my mind a little later, when Olivia steps off the bus and immediately receives a wolf whistle. The tone and intention of the film is promptly clear.
The short constantly switches between greyscale and color, the former being reserved for the adult and resigned Olivia and the latter for her younger and more hopeful self. Though this is not a particularly inspired choice in my opinion, it still works effectively. The stark juxtaposition of both experiences of her hometown serves to emphasize just how much has changed.
Much of the film centers around the ice cream shop neighboring Olivia’s home, where a “pretty young woman” greets a young Olivia and gives her extra vanilla ice cream on her way back from school. However, as the color bleeds out of the scene, the ice cream place is shuttered closed and on the wall next to it are posters upon posters of missing women—“Has visto a..?” or “Have you seen..?”
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
As the 14 minutes of this short go on, it gets heavier and heavier. We watch a young Olivia find the pretty young woman replaced by another at the ice cream shop one day, only to be found smiling in the first poster of a missing woman on the wall. She tears off the poster and stores it in a box under her bed.
The film’s use of audio is largely unassuming, being largely ambient and interspersed with narrative voiceovers from an adult Olivia. When the story’s tension finally cumulates in two nightmare sequences, what’s most jarring is the abrupt loudness. Suddenly, the film is no longer quietly haunting—it quickly becomes something terrifying, even leaning into some horror elements. The women from the missing posters call out for help and disembodied hands snake around—and into—the pretty young woman’s body, tearing her apart as the voiceover says, “Body of a woman, no woman.” The imagery in these sequences is uncomfortable to watch, making you suddenly aware of the body you’re inhabiting.
The short comes to a powerful close with color bleeding out of the scene as Olivia quietly ends a short monologue with a simple, “I miss vanilla ice cream.” A small text box in the bottom left dedicates the film to all the pretty young women and in the ensuing silence, the ending card leaves us with a haunting message about femicide in Mexico. So many have disappeared and been killed that they become reduced to numbers and statistics—an invisibility that is the final violence they suffer.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute