In A Whisper: Film Review by Mildred Nicotera

In a Whisper (A media voz) is a mix of fiction and documentary that follows the life of two filmmakers throughout their native Cuba and their years as immigrants witnessing the gradual erosion of their ignorance beneath the millstone of migration.

The film starts as a thoroughly Cuban piece of migration literacy. Still, it turns into the story of any vibrant woman who migrates to Europe and finds herself in a resistance position to pursue a dream. The film produces a memory for the Cuban community, thus enabling to fathom the collective soul of their adopted countries. Precisely, the visual letters unveiling what is non-visual, the cardinal points that mark the perimeter of their utopia, while linking the invisibility of the migrant subject to the dominant voyage that always initiates with the rights acquired by birth.

The testimony of the audio-visual letters between the two filmmakers is both cheerful and poignant. The migration experience seen through the eyes of Patricia, who finds herself lost at the crossroads of being an illegal immigrant in Spain for three years, is different from Heidi’s exposure to a different language and culture in Switzerland.

The story is rooted in Havana, Amsterdam, Galicia, Madrid, and Geneva. The visual letters that the filmmakers exchange exude nostalgia and bring out the necessary sharpness to pull down their wall of intimacy, allowing us to look behind it as their conversation flows naturally even before shooting the first scene. When they turn the camera on themselves, for what would be the audience scrutiny, their letters start shaping a nation with a glance of Bergman’s Persona and Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment—their bodies and minds are both personae and memories through examination. In retrospect, Heidi's and Patricia’s lives have a public interest, for they embrace not only the experiences of their homeland fellows but all those women who experience migration and desire for motherhood. The camera frames the faces of the conflict as they and their partners go through fertilization treatment. The stories they told themselves to retrieve memories affect almost everything, including shots that reveal how they got along with their partners trying to stage the very core of honesty for the cameras.

If a single storyline could be said to grapnel the film and the feminist filmmaking in the best tradition of Chantal Akerman and Sara Gómez, it would be this: The filmmakers’ ethos of taking their desire for motherhood to the space of the lens.

Heidi Hassan and Patricia Fernández record a journey over 15 years that is unarguably permeable to the fluids of ethnocultural experiences. Above all, the feature documentary is courageous, from selling Cuban cocktails in a street market in Spain to renting a film camcorder in Switzerland. It was there where the shop owner let out that for him, Heidi could be the assistant but not the movie director in a scene that is quintessential for documenting the perspective of the immigrants in the film.

The dream of the exile disappears as much as the conceptual Cuban “worm”[1] to give way to other biopolitical categories to manage a transnational reality in the Foucauldian sense of “right of power over life.” The protagonists of the film are two women who design a path of liberation outside a national frame where power and politics occupy the same step in the oppressive ladder.

In a Whisper is a necessary film inside the island; it was about time to see a documentary that doesn’t fit the American dream of the Cuban exile. For a foreign audience, the film has the potential to act as a conversant diagnosis of the Cuban complex past and present and that deep self-effacement for which the documentary was praised in the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and the Havana Film Festival. Self-effacement, which is the hallmark and insight of the storyline along with its extraordinary humanity and ability to articulate the lens narrative from the joyful spirit of youth to the dense perils of growing up.

If modernity is liquid after Bauman, decoloniality is gaseous after Mignolo and is undoubtedly beyond binarism. However, ideology has divided Cubans, and politics has split its nationals into two subjectivities that are virtually dissolved into the whisper of Patricia Pérez and Heidi Hassan.

In some way, the filmmakers are empowering an autoethnographic version of the whole Cuban national show and an emotional diaspora live show as well, even when many Cubans, especially those living in the U.S, might not identify with the stories because of their distant experience.

Yes, these are true, European stories. Meanwhile, beyond the distinctiveness, we still remember being chased by that “Image where you can find me.” There is something ultimately pertinent and daring in the film with the “others” thinking and feeling for themselves about Cuba and de-rewarding the “worm” exhibitionism. Most of the shots are simply beautiful, and the democracy of the documentary has given them a voice to approach the national discursive production from their emotional journey. It’s a documentary to be studied in the Cuban schools to rethink a collective identity that is not acknowledged in the multiplicity it involves.

As depicted by the filmmakers, they exiled themselves to Europe, carrying the dream of filmmaking in their luggage. In an early scene, Patricia said to Heidi: “Only you can help me,” and the truth is they have nothing but one another to answer the question as to who they film for and use their friendship to support each other’s work with insightful reels.

I could find the answer to Heidi’s question, “Have you ever wondered who you are filming for?” in the words of the Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić referring to documentary filmmaking: “You can only tell stories about people you know well, for whom the injustices visited upon them or the injustices they have visited upon others, have hurt you personally.”

In a Whisper is a film in touch with the very female intimacy world visited by injustices. Still, I wonder if the emotions evoked by the directors are as apolitical as their screening privacies make them appear. In any case, it is a very fitting initiation of a world career as independent filmmakers.

[1] In Cuba a dissident of the government ideology is called a worm: un gusano