Aida E. Bueno Sarduy

 

Getting into film production has been a challenging journey. Since my childhood in Cuba, my native country, my life was marked by African ancestry as I was crowned from birth, by my ancestors on my paternal side, as the daughter of Naná Buruké and Obbatalá (Oxalá). In this Afro-religious world of black women in which I grew up, I discovered as a child the prejudice and racism of the white Cuban society against this knowledge, against these religious beliefs, against this form of spirituality that was considered irrational, demonic and atavistic and that belonged to a past of slavery of the black population. Because of these prejudices created about this African imaginary, many black people, out of ignorance of their own Afro-diasporic histories and memories, and because they wanted to integrate into the dominant society, completely abdicated from this spiritual heritage; in other cases, only in public, seeking in private, secretly, the help of the orishás, and, finally, there were even those who decided to live openly their religiosity.

 

As an exile from the communist regime, in my life outside Cuba I became more and more aware of my connection with this African ancestry, I became closer and closer to this part of my biography and I decided to focus my academic career on the cultural and religious trajectory of black women. That Afro-political and Afro-aesthetic consciousness awakens outside Cuba, when I discover myself as a migrant woman in a white Europe and I realize that I must add European racism to the racism that I had experienced in Cuba as a black woman.

 

I did my doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology, specializing in Anthropology of religion and feminist theory and criticism. My doctoral thesis deals with female priestly leadership in the Xangô of Recife, and is entitled: The decline of female priestly leadership in the Xangô of Recife. The city of women that will not be. In this research work that lasts for almost 9 years, I travel through the northeast of Brazil, getting to know different terreiros in some municipalities of the states of Bahia, Maranhão and Pernambuco. During this period, I contact and interview women who lead candomblé terreiros, women who lead Afro-Brazilian communities towards other spaces marked by other ways of thinking about the world, the community, gender and Afro spirituality. 

 

This experience has had an extraordinary impact on me and it is within it that I am formed as an anthropologist specialized in this leadership of black women of candomblé. From the beginning of the elaboration of my doctoral thesis, through each of my academic publications, as well as, later, in my film productions, all my works become a tribute to black women.

 

As an academic I understood that the university space is a closed space, and still -unfortunately- committed to colonialism and institutional racism. The path of artistic creation has allowed me to express in a freer and more authorial medium, such as filmmaking, the issues that I have worked on as an academic and archival researcher on slavery, racism, and other related topics, making them transcend the academic sphere. 

 

My first film work was "Guillermina," a short documentary film in which, through archival footage and animation, I expose the irrational nature of racism and how it is introduced and reproduced in human relationships. I produced this piece with my own resources, since it is extraordinarily complex to access institutional support for filmmaking. The existing production companies work with many projects and it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for them to commit to a new director on a subject like this, which also highlights issues that have remained hidden for a long time. 

 

On this path as a filmmaker and producer I faced all the difficulties that Afro-diasporic filmmakers have when it comes to placing our productions in an industry that is characterized by having other priorities, that dialogues better with other themes and that, ultimately, appropriates our productions if it finds them commercially profitable. An industry where Afro-descendant women filmmakers only represent a minority and within which we constantly run the risk of losing the ability to decide on our productions if we do not have the resources and the ability to produce them. 

 

All this led me to found Ibirí filmes, in order to have a legitimate space within the industry where Afro-creative women can produce our works from our points of view, with the care and attention they deserve, and from where we can apply for state and private aid as creators of cultural content.