Skip to main content
A group of young women are talking
Texas Premiere

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.

Curator's Note

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.

Screenings