Cinema has the superpower to reach thousands of people and talk about gender violence and the problems that happen to women, stated this Sunday the Mexican actress and producer Karla Souza, in her participation in the 38th edition of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG).
“When I was a child, what impacted me the most of everything I consumed (in the cinema) were the stories and I saw it as a superpower, precisely for this reason (I was interested) the theme of gender violence, which is what I experienced. There are many narratives, stories and ways of telling these situations that we live in the country, ”he said as part of the panel“ We in the cinema ”.
Souza, who in 2018 denounced the sexual abuse of which he was the victim by a director, affirmed that In this sector the same inequalities occur for women as in other areas not only on issues of harassment, but also on wages and minimization of their work, and conditions in which they carry out their work,
“Not only in the cinema, but in the world, women are not thought of as producers, we do not have spaces for breastfeeding, to do the care that is needed for being mothers, they do not treat us the same, because the experience and day-to-day life of a woman does not enter into the people who are planning the system,” she claimed.
The talk took place as part of the activities for the incubation of new film projectsin which the Mexican screenwriter María René Prudencio highlighted that in this industry the difference in wages happens as a “sacred law” for which no one gives an explanation, despite the fact that women claim it.
“Women can direct, act, edit, produce and their salary will always be less than half that of a manIt’s a gigantic industry problem. Nobody gives an explanation, it is given as a sacred law, because that is how women’s work is conceived, as having less value than that of men,” he explained.
He assured that for there to be more equal spaces for women in this and other areas, men should refuse to receive more than women who do the same work.
“Refusing to live in a world where society considers your partner less requires a global attitude to live in a just world, where it is worth living, where we are not spreading violence and that is everyone’s job,” he said.
From this Saturday until next Friday, the 38th edition of the FICG will bring together almost 80 short and feature films in the official competition in the sections of Mexican and Ibero-American cinema, fiction, documentary, animation, with an environmental theme and related to the community LGBTQ+.