Among those who enjoyed the last day of the Karlovy Vary festival competition were the creators of the Dominican movie Miriam Lies, which tells the tale of a young, mixed-raced girl from a middle-class family who, while celebrating her fifteenth birthday, discovers the extent of both internal and external racism. “In the Dominican republic, class division is unfortunately still very common and very visible, because black Dominicans form the poorer strata,“ commented director Natalia Cabral.
Cabral directed the film in collaboration with Oriol Estrada, whom she met during her studies in Cuba. The pair has already collaborated on several documentaries. “We have a similar approach to fiction and documentary. We always depart from situations which really happened to us,” explained Estrada. This approach is connected to their emphasis on casting the principle roles of Miriam Lies with young women who are very similar to their characters. “We worked for several months on making sure the girls really did become friends. We let them improvise a lot on set and some of that even ended up in the film. Not the scene where the girls smoke, though,” Oriol added. The actor of the principle role herself, Dulce Esther Rodríguez Castillo, is well-acquainted with the theme of the film from her own experience. “She attends a school full of mixed-race kids, but the parents are always imploring them to date white people,” said Estrada.
The creators of Miriam Lies don’t consider their film a mere coming-of-age portrait, which is one of the reasons it doesn’t contain any sex scenes. „We wanted to capture a story where nothing seems to be happening but, in the background, there are basic questions of racism and class division which affect the characters from the inside,“ Oriol Estrada described the directing team’s intention at the press conference.
