A father and son crossed by family mandates finally decide to talk. Bicho, Emma and Andrés put what is expected of them in crisis. In the documentary film “The Silence of Men”, Lucía Lubarsky starts from the men in her family and investigates the fears, complicities, contradictions and violence that they experience as men. It can be seen this weekend in Tanti, Córdoba and Villa General Belgrano with a proposal for debate with local organizations.
A few years ago, in some environments, it became more acceptable to talk or ask questions about the forms of masculinity that men assume. It is not simple, in a context in which the offer of the masculine reinforces old sexist mandates and responds to the anti-feminist backlash in tune with the “fashion” of the extreme right.
Lucia Lubarsky, director, producer, poet and native of Córdoba living in Buenos Aires, premiered the documentary “The Silence of Men” in 2023. She proposes a documentary view based on several men in her environment and says about it: “The documentary exercise is an opportunity to enter into conversation, as Eduardo Coutinho said. To open new spaces for thought and discussion, even from discomfort.”
It includes fragments of home videos, filmed by her mother and father, in a country ranch in the south of the province, where they spent their childhood and in which she, her sister and brother appear. This is how this work is crossed by the autobiographical. “Despite being very close to male friends, colleagues, family, partners, I really thought: ‘I want to know what happens to them or what they can tell about what happens to them.’ And I left with my family to think about those links because, in that cell that is the father-son relationship, there are so many commands, silences and understandings that I find as attractive as they are necessary to address,” Lucía explained on the occasion of the presentation of the film. .
In addition to their family world, there are also other cis, gay and trans men who put together a map of current voices and diversities, and who realize the breadth that this genre can mean, but with a common axis that runs through them all: the mandates and exercise of hegemonic masculinity.
The director investigates what they are silent about, what we have pointed out so many times about them, about why they do not express what they feel, where they talk about what happens to them, what they do with everything they have learned about how they should act based on what is expected of them. they. With the advance of feminisms in the country and the didactics that each feminist launched in their family, loves, work to explain machismo, patriarchal violence and a long etcetera, the demand moved towards them: is another type possible? of men? In this work, the author takes a photo of the time that is surely replicated in other environments.
“For decades, feminisms have been organizing ourselves in networks, meetings, massive demonstrations, creating collective practices and new narratives. For years, I have been asking myself, along with friends and colleagues, about the concerns of men and about what spaces they find and give themselves to share their fears, their contradictions, the violence they suffer and practice, their desire, their places of not knowing. Where they stand, what they feel and what they can say about what they feel. In “The Silence of Men,” there is an attentive, but not naive, look, a critical observation that opens up listening by suspending punitive judgments,” details the director in an interview conducted by journalist Mariana Carbajal.
Lucía says that she began the project out of the uncertainty generated by what men do not dare to say. “What violence do they continue to practice consciously or without it?” And she affirms that she had a more personal motivation and a more sociopolitical one. “For years now, as feminisms, we have dismantled many stories sustained and fed by a patriarchal society about the social roles of women in the private and public spheres. We have built, not without obstacles, other narratives that open up other possibilities. There is an absence of questions about masculine worlds that do not reproduce practices of normative masculinity, forms that are already happening, but that are often lived in the shadows or in solitude. Putting those other experiences on the screen, in everything that was and remains on the sidelines. Possibly, there are men who identify with that edge and it seemed interesting to me to show it.
The director presents the film in various parts of the province with a proposal for debate with local organizations. This tour is carried out in conjunction with FRACTAL, a network of cultural spaces and managers that invite independent artists from all over the country to tour different stages in the capital of Córdoba and the mountains.
It starts on Friday the 28th at 7 p.m. in the OTILIA space in Tanti, with Vivas y Viajando nos Quiero, Oxitocine and Paz organic culture. On Saturday it continues at Puerta 276 at 6 pm and here the proposal is together with the Red Psicólogxs Feministas Córdoba. And the tour closes on Sunday the 30th at the Sidrería Cultural de Villa General Belgrano at 6:30 p.m., together with the rescue organization Acuerpando Colectiva Feminista del Valle de Calamuchita, who have been carrying out, since 2023, the Púrpura film series, with a curatorship in around issues of women’s rights and LGBTTTIQ+.
He was 10 years old in one of the scenes in the family video that it includes. There, she says that she wants her family not to be sexist; She was 1995 in a field in the south. “I don’t know where I got it from, I have no idea and neither does my family. But I can understand that a lot of what I saw, perhaps from an intuitive level, I did not want to replicate in my adult life,” she says. That intuitive impulse as a child, which led her in this artistic career – a destination that is not expected for a country girl – is perhaps part of the impulse to show other experiences that are on the edges and that are possible despite the mandates. .
*By Editorial La ink / Cover image: frame «The silence of men» (2023).
Keywords: Argentine cinema, feminism, Masculinities
