Memories of a Burning Body (2024)

Costa Rica is not a country with a long or prolific tradition of internationally distributed cinema, which makes Memories of a Burning Body (2024) something of a notable arrival on the festival circuit. The film comes from director Antonella Sudasassi, a Costa Rican filmmaker working here in co-production between Costa Rica and Spain, with Substance Films, Playlab Films and Bendita Film Sales behind the project. Sudasassi constructs what might be called a docufiction, a form that blurs the line between documentary interview and dramatised narrative, to explore how three women came of age during an era when sexuality, desire and the female body were subjects ringed by silence and social shame. The film runs a lean 90 minutes and carries no tagline, perhaps because the subject matter speaks plainly enough on its own terms.

The structural conceit is that three distinct women, Ana, Patricia and Mayela, each shaped by the unspoken rules and quiet impositions of a repressive cultural moment, eventually converge into a single 65-year-old figure looking back across her life. It is a device that calls for careful handling, and Sudasassi leans into the fragmentary, memory-as-mosaic quality that the format allows. The principal cast, Sol Carballo, Paulina Bernini Víquez, Juliana Filloy, Liliana Biamonte and Juan Luis Araya, are largely drawn from Costa Rican and Latin American theatre and screen, and the performances carry the weight of a film that is more interested in feeling and recollection than in conventional plot mechanics. For audiences familiar with the kind of auteur-led female-centred drama that has come out of Latin America and Spain in recent years, the film sits in recognisable company, and it has drawn comparisons to works exploring womanhood under patriarchal constraint, much like Mustang, another drama concerned with the policing of young women's lives and bodies. Closer in time and form, Tiger Stripes, another recent drama grappling with female identity and bodily experience, offers an interesting point of comparison from a very different cultural context.

The film arrived with considerable critical warmth behind it, and ratings on the major platforms have been generous, which means expectations tend to be set fairly high by the time most viewers sit down with it. Whether those expectations are met is, as ever, a personal matter and one that depends quite a bit on what you bring to the screen. On that note, here is what I made of it.

A-Z World Movie Tour Costa Rica I'm sorry but I really didn't understand the massive praise heaped on this film. Maybe it's just because I'm a man and this is a story about 3 women in their younger years, moving through into their older years. The film is staged as a docufiction and I just found it incredibly boring. I know it was beautifully shot but other than that... this really didn't do anything for me. A real let down considering the high ratings.

I do think it is worth being honest about that disconnect, because the gap between critical consensus and personal experience is part of what makes talking about film worthwhile in the first place. The docufiction format, for all its formal interest, asks quite a lot of the viewer's patience, and if the emotional frequency of the piece does not lock in early, those 90 minutes can feel considerably longer. I can see what Sudasassi was reaching for, and the craft on a visual level is genuinely hard to argue with. But a beautiful frame does not automatically carry you through a film that leaves you at arm's length. Sometimes a film is simply not for you, and the honest thing is to say so rather than dress it up. On to the next one.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2024  | Watched: 2025-06-09

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Trailer

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