After creating a groundbreaking law against cyberviolence, Olimpia wages an internal battle to heal her wounds and reclaim her name.
SYNOPSIS
Olimpia Coral Melo did not set out to become a feminist icon. The humiliation after her sex-tape went viral, made her want to give up her own name. She spent thirteen years promoting a law against cyber sex violence in Mexico. Now, as Olimpia Law reaches strongly throughout Latin America, she’ll have to reconcile with her wounds and retrieve the name that shame tried to take from her.
Director Statement
Being a woman in Mexico is terrifying. Every day is a battle to survive harassment, rape, or even murder. Online life is by no means safer. "Virtual is real" became Olimpia Coral’s life motto after spending years as a slave to a viral sex video. Unlike so many others, she was able to reconstruct herself. Her story gave me and millions of women hope. That’s why I want to show this personal process of healing. I want to understand what happens after the abuse, the betrayal, and the seemingly loss of one's self. Violence in any form can't just be "gotten over with" or "forgotten". Victims live with open wounds. We, the ones that managed to survive them.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director/Producer Indira Cato
Indira Cato is a Mexican documentary filmmaker and film production professor In 2018 she founded Chumbera Producciones, a production company mainly focused on gender issues. She studied Dramatic Literature and Drama at UNAM. In 2014 she produced Llévate mis amores (All of me), directed by Arturo González Villaseñor. From 2017 to 2019 she produced #Mickey, directed by Betzabé García, with the support of the Sundance DocFund, Chicken and Egg's (Egg)celerator Lab, and IMCINE. She is currently co-producing Maize Daughters, directed by Alfonso Gastiaburo (with the support of INCAA and IMCINE). Olimpia is her first film as a director.
Producer
Hugo Chávez Carvajal
Ecuador and a doctorate in anthropology at UAM-I. His academic work, on the one hand, focuses on the repair, reuse and recycling of audiovisual technologies, as well as the works that revolve around them; on the other hand, he is interested in the history and development of ethnographic and collaborative cinema in Latin America. As a cultural manager, he served, between 2010 and 2011, as Head of Content and Cultural Projects for Youth of the "Alas y Raíces" Program of the Ministry of Culture. As an audiovisual producer, he has directed and produced several documentaries on social and environmental issues —such as “Obsolescence” (2015), “Mainteniendo trajectories” (2019), “Reparar” (2022)— which have been presented in various national and international festivals. He teaches classes at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences (FCPyS) of the UNAM.
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