Trotacalles

Matilda Landeta reimagines melodrama through a feminist lens in this simmering story of two estranged sisters – one married into money, another surviving through sex work – whose intertwined destinies expose the brutal economies of patriarchal power and desire.

Bound by family yet divided by fate, two sisters take opposing paths; Elena (Miroslava Stern) into wealth and respectability, Maria (Elda Peralta) into exploitation on the streets. When their lives cross again, desire and betrayal spark a devastating reckoning.

In her third feature, pioneering filmmaker Matilde Landeta, one of the first women to direct features in Mexico, uses the melodrama genre to enter into a seedy underworld of pimps, cabarets and sex workers. Landeta, who financed her own early films and fought tirelessly against a hostile industry, crafts a nuanced depiction of women’s lives, where sisterly solidarity emerges amid exploitation. Formally inventive and socially daring, it challenges Golden Age cinema’s patriarchal archetypes and reclaims melodrama as a radical cinematic space.

This film is part of Stronger Than Love: ¡Too Much Mexican Melodrama!, a traveling programme that puts female voices in the spotlight, in front of and behind the camera. The programme is curated by Invisible Women: archive activists who bring female filmmakers and filmmakers on the margins out of oblivion and rewrite women filmmakers into film history.