Ramona

Feeling unprepared for her upcoming role as a 15-year-old pregnant girl from the outskirts of Santo Domingo, an actor from a more affluent background, Camila, decides to sit down with pregnant young girls for inspiration. Yet in the process, as the sorority of 15 teens candidly recount their realities on-camera, little by little they unexpectedly influence the film’s production, taking it into unchartered territory. Initially presenting itself as a behind-the-scenes making-of, Ramona quickly becomes a hazy postmodernist mix of telenovela pastiche, observational documentary, filmed rehearsals, cinéma vérité and theatre that constantly plays with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, reality and artifice.

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Ramona

DRC / 82 min / 2023 / doc
Texas Premiere
in Spanish with English subtitles
Direction: Victoria Linares Villegas
Screenplay: Victoria Linares Villegas, Diego Cepeda
Cinematography: Jaime Guerra
Editing: Melisa Miranda Ulloa
Producers: Jordi Gassó, Rafael Llaneza, Pedro García

Trailer

Ramona is a film about who gets to tell stories, who gets to make films. The actress and director do research in order to get closer to the experience of a pregnant 15-year-old from a certain barrio. But soon those pregnant girls take over the film - their dreams, their concerns, their behavior take up the screen. Ramona dramatizes the limits of its own conception - the somewhat banal and melodramatic script is abandoned to get closer to the girls, each one becoming a Ramona, wearing the school uniform, becoming another, becoming themselves.