Synopsis
“I was born to dance. I would lay awake all night long, repeating the rhythms in my head until they became a part of me” -La Chana
She was one of the greatest stars in the flamenco world, captivating audiences worldwide with her innovative style and breathtaking use of rhythm in the 1960s and 1970s. LA CHANA is a feature-length documentary film that brings us close to the heart and mind of La Chana, the self-taught Gypsy dancer, Antonia Santiago Amador, as she returns to the stage to give a final seated performance after a break of two decades.
Peter Sellers, with whom she features in The Bobo (1967), invited her to Hollywood. Instead, at the peak of her career, she suddenly disappeared from the scene. Along the way, La Chana reveals the secret behind her disappearance: for 18 years she was the victim of domestic abuse at the hands of her first husband. In this dramatic story about the process and power of creativity, about aging, perseverance and re-invention, La Chana crystallises the inevitable clashes between her life’s extremes and contradictions; between the talented artist on stage and the woman behind the scenes.
AWARDS:
* VPRO IDFA Audience Award
* Nomination for IDFA AWFJ
* EDA Award for Best Female Directed Documentary Audience Award – Le Voci dell’Inchiesta
Director’s Note
La Chana’s story highlights a number of topics that have both current relevance and universal
appeal. As La Chana nears the end of her physical capability to dance, La Chana needs to re-define herself. On her journey, she brings her audience close and challenges them to reflect on specific topics: aging, the imminent loss of something that defines you and that you love, acceptance and re-invention.
Meanwhile, the story of La Chana’s past highlights topics that have an important social relevance
today. La Chana is giving us rare, intimate access to her Gitano world and how she lives and experiences it as a woman. Through her deeply personal story, we gain an idea of the role and treatment of Gypsy women in Spanish Gitano culture and what implications it has for a woman to suffer domestic abuse in a marginalized society.
In the film, we approach the topic of abuse very carefully, making sure that we don’t point fingers, make generalizations or put our protagonist in a risky situation. Our approach is to stay very close to La Chana’s individual, personal and emotional experience of domestic violence- her loneliness, helplessness, isolation and the feeling that she was stuck in a vicious circle where her own community was both her only support and her ‘prison warden’ that kept her locked inside a violent reality.
I believe that it’s very important to tell stories of women’s lives from all walks of life, and in this documentary, we have an amazing story of survival and empowerment through pure art and strength of character. For a change, it’s a story about a Gypsy woman, who through her own tragedy gives hope and encouragement to young women, globally, as well as in the Gitano and Roma communities, to fight for their dreams whatever they might be. My mission is not only to tell a unique story with universal appeal, but also to make sure we bring it to the audiences who will get most out of it. After all, empowerment through storiesis the power of documentaries.
Director
Lucija Stojević
Lucija Stojevic was educated in The University of Edinburgh (Architectural Design) and Prague Film School (Directing and Editing). She has independently produced over 30 short format documentaries for The Guardian, The New York Times and Global Post. Her work has also been displayed in the context of video art in exhibitions in Vienna and Graz (Austria), Screens of Barcelona/LOOP (Spain) and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival (UK). In 2014, she established Noon Films S.L. a production company focusing on creative documentaries in Barcelona, Spain.
