This short film will screen with other short films in
The Opening Night Block – Block 4 | LAS JEFAS BLOCK
Friday, December 9th at 7pm
Palm Springs Art Museum. Palm Springs, California.
Buy Tickets Here
Three generations of Dominican women explore their relationship to relaxing their hair. By conjuring the magic of water and the power of her ancestors, a daughter uses spoken word poetry as an incantation to break the generational curse that has blocked the women in her family from locating where joy lives inside the body.
Shenny De Los Angeles is a Dominican-American interdisciplinary performance artist. Centralizing Black & Brown Caribbean femmes in her stories, Shenny invites every hurt to free itself into joy- affirming the beauty in being alive. Their work has been commissioned by The Latinx Playwright Circle, Latina Magazine, and Mabou Mines Theatre, to name a few. Her short film, The Ritual to Beauty, received the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance and is also now available to stream on The New Yorker. Currently, as an Artist in Residence at Harlem Stage and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Shenny is exploring ritual performance pieces that integrate spoken word in theatrical and cinematic form. Learn more about her work at www.shennydelosangeles.com
Maria Marrone is a Venezuelan-born filmmaker and photographer. She received her degree in Film & Television from New York University, and has recently completed a master’s at the London School of Oriental & African Studies in Global Media and Communications. She has worked with Oscar-nominated directors Karim Amer & Jehane Noujaim, as well as with award-winning editor Keiko Deluchi. Her work has been showcased on a variety of platforms including VICE’s Creators Project and the New Latin Wave Festival in New York.
This is a love letter to the women who raised me and the women who will come after me. Honoring my mother and her mother; two women who hold their privacy so close to their skin, shared their testimony for everyone to see, and I will always be grateful to them for trusting us with that. I also honor the blessing it was to make this with my childhood friend, Maria Marrone, who took my words and painted the imagery in its sacredness. Creating this piece freed me to feel just how much I am loved. May I continue to share the legacy of Dominican women. We are a miracle to witness. – shenny
I was welcomed into this story to help adapt it from a theatre piece to a film. The intention behind the making of this was to step into the most personal element of a woman’s relationship with self and illustrate how the effects of colonialism affects the most intimate, warm, tender, and sacred spaces of the heart. We hope to illustrate that the chain of generational violence can only break once we forgive the hands of those that have hurt us.- Maria Marrone
