People this it’s easy to make documentaries but, at the risk of stating the obvious, it’s not. The first hurdle is funding. The original “God is a Woman” is the brain child of Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau. Because he couldn’t pay his debts, the banks seized the negatives, causing the ire of the people that the film aimed to depict – the Kuma people of Panama. Which leads us to the second hurdle – that documentaries have to about something deep. Gaisseau insisted that the Kuma are a matriarchal pre-modern society, even if it wasn’t really. The version of God is a Woman we have is Andres Peyrot’s. He shows that keeping the traditions alive are Kuma people, some of them in modern garb.
‘History is a pack of lies [we agree] upon’. Those are words human crap bag Napoleon once said, words I keep in mind as I watch God is a Woman. I remember them as it shows the Kuma men reenacting military brutality and Indigenous vengeance. I remember them as a boat drives through the current, as the boats’ passengers mourn the islands disappearing because of rising oceans and climate change. There are moments when it doesn’t feel like the film can go deeper than ‘Indigenous people are modern too’, and the depiction of women feels too few and far between. Thing it, the Kuma knows that the film is misrepresentation. But there’s beauty as they finally reframe the ‘original’ film, making it their own.
- Rated: NR
- Genre: Documentary
- Release Date: 9/7/2023
- Directed by: Andres Peyrot
- Studio: Industries Films, P.S. Productions, Upside Films
