Stronger Than Love

During De Cinema’s focus program SPOTLIGHT ON WOMXN DIRECTORS, the activist film (archive) collective Invisible Women curates our matinee programming. Invisible Women brings female filmmakers and filmmakers on the margins out of oblivion with screenings, events and articles. Their traveling program Stronger Than Love: ¡Too Much Mexican Melodrama! selects visually stunning and emotionally explosive films from Mexico’s Golden Age (1930s-1950s). The program includes everything we know about melodrama – the impeccable aesthetics and turbulent passions, impossible loves and dramatic love triangles – but this time, Mexico, not America, forms the backdrop.

During Mexico’s golden film age, melodrama was an instrument for female expression, on the screen and behind the camera. Melodrama is often described as a ‘feminine genre’ because of the emotional intensity of the stories with their complex heroines and hordes of devoted female fans. But melodramas were also often the films that made it possible for women directors to sharpen their art, resulting in groundbreaking work. The classics Invisible Women selected for this programme, showcase workwomanship in the period the Mexican film industry was at its height, and show the power of the melodrama to provoke, to seduce, and the overwhelm.

The program includes Adela Sequeyro’s LA MUJER DE NADIE (NOBODY’S WIFE), the first Mexican sound film directed by a woman, TROTACALLES (STREETWALKER) and MAS FUERTE QUE EL AMOR (STRONGER THAN LOVE) Tulio Demicheli.