Director's Statement . . . ALTAR: Cruzando Fronteras, Building Bridges

 . . . celebrating the life of our querida, Gloria E. Anzaldua

Film Synopsis ALTAR: Cruzando Fronteras, Building Bridges.

A documentary film directed by Paola Zaccaria and Daniele Basilio (2009). Research, script and executive production: Paola Zaccaria. Produced by Università di Bari and Regione Puglia. Assessorato al Mediterraneo.

In this documentary on Gloria Anzaldúa, the effort has been to document how her creative mind worked visually, how she was interested in art, and consequently her influence on women artists. After having gone through Anzaldúa’s papers (published and unpublished works, graphic works, collection of posters, buttons and t-shirts, etc.) collected at Austin University, Texas, I have been able to map her links with artists, activists and cultural centers and interviewed women who were inspired by her thinking and poetics (such as Liliana Wilson, Santa Barraza, Juana Alicia, Amalia-Mesa Bains, Antonia Castañeda, Betita Martinez, Graciela Sanchez, Gloria Ramirez, Irene Reti, and al.). We have also shot articrafts, photographies, video, painting, murales inspired to other artists by her poetics and theory of la frontera.

On the Texas borderlands in McAllen, Mission, and Hidalgo (shot in April 2008, before the actual building of the wall), we captured the material passageways between Mexican and American borders along the Rio Grande-Rio Bravo River which were the source for the texture of crossing which makes her work so special (insider guide: Daniel García Ordaz ).

A special attention has been devoted to the poet’s altares reposited in the University Library of Santa Cruz, CA (curator: Irene Reti), which were an integral part of her spiritual life and creative process as a writer and may be the best picture to visualize the frame of her creative process.

The editing of the video has been built on the idea that the film should have the structure of an altar, a mestizo style and a poetic-musical fronterizo rhythm (given by the music of Lourdes Perez). CONTACT ZONES

WHY A FILM ON GEA and Mexican-American borderlands is meaningful for the new Mediterranean borders:

1) both South-American and Mediterranean lands and cultures have been colonized oppressed and exploited several times;

2) both are set in the borderlands. If the land we live in, in South Italy, is a borderland between Africa, the Eastern countries and fortress Europe, Texas is the borderland between South and North America;

3) both areas witness the arrivals and the expulsions of the illegals, aliens (USA), clandestines (Europe);

4) they have gone through discrimination with regards to North (America/Europe) and yet, since we are both inhabitants of the South, we feel rage at and try to resist to xenophobia, racisms, sexual abuse and oppose detention camps, the global lagers.

Paola Zaccaria, University of Bari. Italy
e-mail: mestiza@libero.it