<< Go to Spanish version

08/16/2023

Review 'Daughter of Rage': An Aesthetic and Poverty-Porn Narrative


By Daniel Ruiz, (Twitter: @tatoruiz), accredited by CineVista at the Lima Film Festival

The debut film by Nicaraguan director Laura Baumeister begins in a municipal landfill. The director's gaze seeks the aesthetic amidst that place - what no one sees - that which often some academic mentors, without much thought, affirm when encountering a 'sensitive' student: Find beauty in ugliness (I'm paraphrasing).

We should raise alarms whenever we come across that sensation of recognizing that a film seeks to stylize misery.

Amidst the presentation of this space created by Baumeister, the little heads of children collecting trash appear. They appear as if lifted by an elevator. In rhythm with a rising sun. They play innocently before the camera, which captures them like children playing in idyllic parks of middle-class neighborhoods. Among these children is the protagonist, María (Ara Alejandra Medal), a clever and outspoken girl who, on her way home, brings the waste she found in that landfill for some puppies she's grown fond of. However, her mother, Lilibeth (Virginia Raquel Sevilla García), constantly reminds her that the puppies are meant for sale. Up until this point, it's all marked by great complexity and careful aesthetics. Beautiful cinematography. Realism wrapped in subtle cellophane.

And the issue isn't with the director or the team. If there's any issue at all, it's undoubtedly the audience for whom this kind of film seems to be intended. "La hija de todas las rabias" (Daughter of Rage) is material for an international audience and critics. It's for European audiences that still seek these kinds of offerings that, at least for me, fall into the category of poverty-porn. Well, exquisite poverty-porn.

But let's return to the narrative. Everything becomes more intricate. The mother's warnings are ignored by the little girl, and the puppies die. But that's not all: there's room to further reinforce the misery that envelops this family. The mother scrapes together money by selling metals found in the landfill and, of course, becomes the target of gang members, one of them being the buyer of the puppies, to whom Lilibeth must lie about their deaths. The macho man, asserting himself, responds with the only thing he has: his virility. Amidst this misery, there's a political backdrop: a private company seeks to take over the waste business. People respond with protests and chaos.

Lilibeth then seeks a way to solve the mess she's gotten herself into and decides to leave the care of her daughter to a man who works in a recycling company. And Lilibeth doesn't return, which adds insult to injury for little María, who tries every possible way to get her mother back.

Now, not everything is so bleak in "La hija de todas las rabias." Behind this turbulent story of a desperate search for the maternal figure, there's visual craftsmanship, a conceptual proposal worth following and keeping an eye on. Laura Baumeister, the author of her country's first fiction film and the first woman to accomplish this feat within the very limited history of Nicaraguan cinema (there have been only five fiction films in the country), doesn't just focus on poverty-porn in her debut. She also weaves a narrative in which her protagonists, mother and daughter, embody, in fantastical and dreamlike ways, a kind of parallel tale, as if they belonged to the family of canines or feliforms (cats, hyenas, panthers).

Baumeister blends realism and the dreamlike. She likens the limitations of her impoverished human protagonists to the restrictions faced by an animal deprived of freedom. The physical cages of isolated animals serve as a metaphor for restricted or confined lives. The mother-daughter relationship is portrayed with special attention to the details that pertain to fantasy, managing to evoke a sense of tenderness and emotion. And if not that, at the very least a reference amidst a search linked to the genuine and the purely poetic in narrating human and familial relationships. This, by the way, also aligns with a tender game set up by the mother, perhaps as the only way to brighten her young daughter's life.

Technical Information



<< Go to Spanish version