World premiere of Mabel Valdiviezo’s film
Silence is the element in which all great things are formed. Thomas Carlyle
by Madeline Mendieta
06/19/2024 – The trip to memory, the encounter with the past, the uprooting, the adventure of being an immigrant and the silence suspended for 15 years, is the story of Mabel Valdiviezo, a Peruvian multidisciplinary artist who recently released her film “Prodigal Daughter” was in theaters from May 29 to June 2 at the 23rd Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival (LALIFF) at the TCL Chinese Theaters in Hollywood. And she announces that it will soon be exhibiting in San Francisco.
The executive director of the Latino Film Institute Axel Caballero mentioned that this year a greater effort was made to support the work of Latina women in the film industry.
This year they presented 22 feature films from the following countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, France, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Among the notable directors are Mabel Valdiviezo, Mar Novo, María Zanetti, Gabriela A. Moses, Antonella Sudasassi Furniss, Carolina Markowicz, Ángeles Cruz and Lillah Halla among others.
Mabel Valdiviezo has a long career as a filmmaker, but also through her painting she captures on her canvases that communion with the past, her parents who left them in her native Peru. The long silence between her family is broken with the film “Prodigal Daughter”, which takes up the parable that Luke, a disciple of Jesus, made known, in which the return of a son who had gone to seek his fortune was told, he returns where his father and he throws him a party.
In the particular case of Mabel, her parents also celebrate her return because they had no idea of the whereabouts of their daughter. What happened during those 16 years? What struggles did the artist face as an undocumented person, without knowledge of the language? These are the questions that are in the subtext of the main story, which is the reunion of a daughter with her parents.
Narrated in the first person, Valdiviezo manages to capture those female voices that wander in search of the American dream and become a personal nightmare, the abuse of alcohol, drugs, the barriers that millions of immigrant women have to face to occupy a place in a multicultural country and with severe policies for the undocumented.
Later, she is diagnosed with a type of cancer and is one more step in the enormous pyramid of obstacles that this artist must overcome with brushes, watercolors, and her films. Despite this, this Latina woman has highlighted and projected her work around the world, including PBS, LALIFF and MTV.
She won the Women in Film Emerging Filmmaker Award and her screenplay, Soledad’s Awakening, was a finalist at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Prodigal Daughter, she has received support from NALIP Latino Media Market, NALIP Latino Producers Academy and the San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant. Mabel is the founder of Haiku Films and Arts 4 Healing.
“Prodigal Daughter” is the return to memory, the journey of Ulysses that took him 20 years to wander the oceans to return to Ithaca, where his wife awaits him. For 16 years, Mabel Valdiviezo was sailing in her own seas, faced her storms, was shipwrecked and reached dry land.
It takes their voice and memories, creating a chorus of immigrants who leave everything behind but always the past beats inside them, but the time comes to face that past, which is a present and that is what this artist tells us who not only shows an enormous sensitivity but also that her life testimony is laid bare before the public, told from the perspective of reunion after silently keeping the pain of absence. https://vimeo.com/944643089
