Navid Nikkhah Azad (ZIZ) – Antonella Sudasassi Furniss presented her second feature film, ‘Memories of a Burning Body,’ in the Panorama section of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival (February 15-25, 2024), where it was awarded the Panaroma’s Audience Award for Best Feature Film.
‘Memories of a Burning Body,’ delves into a time when suppression, a sexualized view of women, and society’s oppressive and tyrannical behavior towards women were at their peak. Women discussing issues and sexual desires were considered great sins, accompanied by fear and terror.
Raised in a repressive era where sexuality was taboo, Ana, Patricia, and Mayela found their understanding of womanhood based on unspoken rules and implicit impositions. Now, their fearless voices incarnate in a single 65-year-old woman, who revisits a kaleidoscopic life of intertwined memories, secrets, and hidden desires.
Read our review of “Memories of a Burning Body” at the 2024 Berlinale
Director Antonella Sudasassi Furniss is a Costa Rican writer, director and producer. Her first film, “The Awakening of the Ants”, premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2019. The film was selected as the Costa Rican entry for the Academy Awards. It became the first Central American film to receive a Goya nomination, and to win a Platino Award. It was selected in more than 65 international film festivals and received 15 international awards. “Memories of a Burning Body” is her second film.
As a writer and director, Antonella Sudasassi Furniss has been interested in telling stories centered on female characters and how they understand their sexuality at the different stages of their lives. “Memories of a Burning Body” delves into sexuality during adulthood.
During a conversation with Antonella Sudasassi Furniss, I discussed her latest film “Memories of a Burning Body,” which won the Panorama Audience Award at the 2024 Berlinale.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: Why did you choose the title ‘Memories of a Burning Body’ for your film, and how does it capture the film’s essence?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: About the title of the movie, I remember thinking about what the women [in the film] said. I was once walking down the street, trying to think, ‘How should it be called? How should it be called?’ when this one phrase that one of the protagonists said came to my mind, which was ‘I need a fireman to put out this fire inside of me.’ So I knew ‘fire’ had to be involved somehow, and of course the story is about the memories of these women. So, in that sense, ‘memory of a burning body’ just popped up in my mind, and I really think that somehow it’s a beautiful metaphor of what the movie is about.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: Why did you choose to focus on three characters in the film, and how does it add to the story?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: At the beginning of the process of the film, I started talking with my grandmother, but she was already too old and she had memory problems, so I couldn’t talk. Or I couldn’t deepen the conversation with her. That inspired me to talk with other women. And eventually I talked even with 15 women. And we continued to talk. And naturally, some of them said they didn’t want to follow up because the subjects were too difficult to talk about, or they didn’t want to expose their families and so on. And at the end, I ended up talking with mainly three women. But in the film there are eight different voices that appear. But that’s true that three women especially are the ones that tell their stories in the film. And I believe this gives a context of how they lived their lives and how they grew up in a more repressive society than what we have now. And I believe having the stories of them all gives up a bigger context of how it went for them, especially because they came from very different contexts. One had a very high education and had a lot of resources. Another one had absolutely none. It was completely the opposite. But somehow in the differences, I found a lot of similarities on how they experienced and lived the different stages of their lives. The context may have been different, but what they felt and how they experienced it was similar. So it helped me intertwine their stories and tell this one single collective story.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: How did you depict memories in the film, and what were you trying to show with them?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: Since I started talking to the women protagonists, they right away told me that they didn’t want to be on screen and that they didn’t want to be recognized because it meant that they couldn’t talk honestly about what they wanted to talk, especially because they were afraid of hurting their loved ones. And I agreed, and I started talking to them. Of course, that represented a challenge for me because I didn’t know what to show on screen. But I did have the feeling that people needed to watch and feel what they lived. So in that sense, I came to the idea of working with actresses, and there were some phrases that they told me that made me think about how these images on screen should be, especially one [of which] that they said [was] that ‘time was not linear. It was like a bubble.’ One of them even told me, ‘I don’t have that much to do now because I don’t work anymore. But somehow I no longer have much time. It’s like if I believe that I relive many of my memories daily.’ So she got lost in memories during her day, and I thought that memories inhabit her body, her life, her house, and live with her at the same time. So I came to this idea of showing in one single location their lives and their memories, their past and the present, coexisting in the same space and time. And I believe it was from their quotes or from their phrases, from their ideas that the imagery in my head started to think of how the visuals should be in the film.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: Why did you choose to set the film mainly in one location, and how does this affect the story?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: Working in a single location I think it was also inspired on what the women protagonists told me. I love this concept of having everything coexist in the same place—past, present, their memories, their daily activities, coexisting in the same time and space. Of course the domestic [place] was the place where they were supposed to be. It was sort of imposed to them. And that came with a lot of restrictions and limitations and probably even frustrations. But somehow the domestic place was also the place where they dreamt, where they were able to imagine what they wanted to be when they grew up, what they wanted to achieve when they grew up. So the house became an extension of their bodies, of their lives, of their hopes and dreams. For us as a production team, it represented also a huge challenge to recreate a fare in the garage of the house or a hospital in the bedroom of the woman where she lived and played. And, you know, it was very challenging. That creative challenge became a creative impulse as well.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: Can you explain how the themes of freedom and self-expression are portrayed in the film and why they connect with viewers?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: What I love most about these women’s stories is that even if they went through so much, they are now in their happiest moments of their lives. They are completely empowered. They are owners of their bodies, of their sexuality, of their lives. And that, I think, will resonate a lot with the audience because this idea that it’s never too late, you know, to start again, to enjoy your life, to keep on dreaming and hoping for a better tomorrow, it’s a beautiful idea. And yes, for me personally, it’s like I have to remember what they went through so that we never take a step back, you know? And that’s what I love the most about their stories and being able to share them.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: Can you talk about how religion is important in the movie and what it means for the story?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: Yes. Unfortunately religion played a huge role in their lives. And it made clear what they could or couldn’t do. Somehow it gave them so many limitations. Everything they felt, everything they desired, was considered a sin. So I remember, even for myself when I was growing up, I remember this one lecture they gave us about sexuality in high school. This woman came and told us that having sex without being married is a sin. But not only that, she also told us that having sex for pleasure in the marriage was also a sin. That you could only have sex when thinking about procreation, about having children. So, you know, religion still plays such a huge role in our society. In Costa Rica, religion, Catholic religion, is by law the official religion. So it still plays a huge role in our daily lives for sure. And of course, religion is very keen on telling you what you can or you can not do, and establishes a morality of what’s good and what’s bad. And that influences how you understand yourself, of how you perceive what you do. So, yes, for sure religion was a definitive thing in their lives, in their perceptions of their womanhood, of their desire, of their sexuality.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: What do you think about criticisms of how the film shows women’s sexual identity and traumas, and what were you trying to achieve with those portrayals?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: The film intends to portray how these women, now in their 60s, 70s, 80s understand themselves as women, and how this concept of womanhood changed and evolved during the years. First considering themselves just as husband or mother material and now trying to unlearn what they learned only to understand themselves as a person without any gender restrictions. So in that sense, I feel the film is sort of a journey of their understanding of womanhood and sexuality as well. And yes, trauma was involved in this evolution of understanding themselves because of the restrictive society in which they lived in. And for me it was very important to portray their stories, to give them a voice. Of course, in the recent years, much has changed for women around the world, especially because I’ve heard so many young women claim their own rights and fight for equality. But somehow I felt that the stories of these older women that leave so much hasn’t been told yet. I believe their experiences are a way of remembering what they went through and how little by little everything started to change so that now life for us women, younger women, is different.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: Why did you make the characters in the film so complex with various emotions and traits?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: I believe the characters in the film are multifaceted characters because basically they are real people. I mean, these are true stories. These are real women that experienced many different things in their lives that now are sharing their stories so that we can know what they went through. It’s basically because their stories are real.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: What were some of the biggest challenges you encountered while making ‘Memories of a Burning Body’?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: One of the biggest challenges of doing this film was to be able to convey their stories in a way that give them the necessary protagonism without losing their ability of connecting with their stories by the use of more fictional elements on screen. For me it was fundamental that the stories remain the core and center of the film. Because these stories talk by themselves. The testimonies are so real, so important, so honest and as well so funny in so many ways that I wanted them to be the center of the film.
Navid Nikkhah Azad: What do you want people to get from the movie once they’ve seen it?
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss: I wish that when people watch the film, they take a minute or two to think how it was for their mothers and grandmothers and hopefully this motivates them to ask them and start a dialogue, a conversation, with them so that we as a society have an intergenerational dialogue about this topic and they stop being such a taboo.
