In a tender mosaic of El Salvador, women reveal the joys and perils of their lives, deeply bonded with water and land. Vena Acuática is shaped by the relationships among women who defend a landscape haunted by environmental negligence and forced migration.
SYNOPSIS
Her name is Vena. She lives on a small patch of land with fourteen volcanos. Vena walks through a mellow-paced visceral dream, a tropical journey. Thriving despite gender-based violence and guided by her ecofeminist beliefs, Vena nurtures a boundless relationship with water and land.
In Vena’s world, the sense of time is fluid and place is experienced in a collage of landscapes, festivals, sacred grounds, water rituals, eco-social unrest, and memories of collective environmental trauma. Vena’s story holds space for the nuances of womanhood and family life, and her personal reflections of key moments throughout her life confronting perilous environmental moments in Salvadoran history.
The Vena Aquatica project encompasses El Salvador’s most urgent contemporary challenges: water access, water contamination, human migration, family disintegration, U.S. intervention, and gender inequality. Women breathe life into this story, and they teach us about climate patterns, water levels, the life of trees, what it means to heal intergenerational trauma and through their spirits we form a tender and emotional bond with water and the environment.
Director Statement
As a Central American artist, I’m committed to building counter-maps that center on connecting with the ancestral or the spiritual over the dominion of our environments. I’m drawn to the ways that grief, displacement, and how we repair shape our landscapes.
Developing Vena Acuática over the years has revealed how relationships, like waterways, form the connective tissues between movements for dignified lives. Under increasingly authoritarian governments, it is these unseen currents that sustain people: a long-distance call with a loved one, a shared memory of home, the dream of returning to a familiar lake. This project is a love letter to the waterways of my homeland as sites of living archives of resistance and care.
Through the lives and labor of women and Indigenous people, the film shows how struggles for environmental and gender justice flow together, inseparable and interdependent.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Director Amada Torruella
Amada Torruella is a Salvadoran artist, filmmaker, and film curator working between El Salvador and the US. Rooted in storytelling from the global south, Amada’s work centers memory, grief, transnational feminism and the relationship between people and home. Amada’s work has been supported by Chicken & Egg Films, Firelight Media, Sundance Institute and has been showcased at New Orleans Film Festival, BlackStar, Femme Frontera, amongst others. In 2023, her short film LA ISLA was acquired by the New Yorker for distribution. Amada’s cultural work leading community storytelling labs and site-specific public artworks has received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation, Surdna Foundation, amongst others.
Seth is a cinematographer, visual artist and documentary filmmaker raised on a small farm in Clover, South Carolina. He practices intimate, observational camerawork and experimental approaches to storytelling that draw attention to the intersections of cultures. Seth collaborates extensively with BIPOC filmmaking communities to tell stories including projects about migrant experiences in the US such as Tamales y Tunas and Los Amuletos Migran that are currently on the festival tour. He also focuses his work critically on whiteness through films such as Meltdown in Dixie, scheduled to premiere on PBS and Topic in 2021, and Waiting for Q, an observational dive into a QAnon rally in Tampa, FL. Seth has exhibited his video work at the Tribeca Film Festival, Vimeo Staff Picks, New Orleans Film Festival, Blackstar amongst others. As a producer over the past five years, he has managed a wide range of projects with dozens of artists including documentary and narrative films, site-specific public art and new media artworks. After receiving an MFA from Boston University in 2007, Seth spent two years traveling with an artist collective across North America documenting and developing community-based projects while living in a converted, vegetable-oil-powered city transit bus.
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Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
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