Intimate Documentaries Made by Women in Colombia: Beyond the Patriarchal Gaze

This chapter studies recent documentaries by young Colombian women filmmakers that explore the politics of violence at a corporeal and personal level, in a national context where most politically conscious films examine violence as a collective concern. It focuses on the documentaries Dopamina (Dopamine, 2019), by Natalia Imery Almario, and Como el cielo después de llover (The Calm After the Storm, 2020), by Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo. These documentaries examine issues of violence and gender through the lens of family dynamics, while also inquiring into the gendered aspects of audiovisual discourse, with a creative use of multisensorial modes of communication. The films combine domestic archival footage with conversations between the directors, their parents, and other people in their lives. The filmmakers talk mainly with their fathers, both progressive men who followed ideas of liberation and social change in their public lives while unwittingly reproducing some of the oppressive aspects of a patriarchal worldview in their private worlds. Both directors expand their means of expression beyond the visual field, developing a liberating way to narrate the female experience, surpassing the constraints of the traditional male-dominated gaze of audiovisual discourse.