(Documentary film, 90 min., written & directed by Barbara Caspar)
As a translator, you sometimes work projects that appear to fall off the face of the earth. Some you never hear of again, others suddenly reappear under a new name or the banner of some other firm than the one that originally contracted your services.
As a translator, you sometimes work projects that appear to fall off the face of the earth. Some you never hear of again, others suddenly reappear under a new name or the banner of some other firm than the one that originally contracted your services.
That's the case with this documentary film, Projekt: Superwoman, the topic of which we found truly intriguing when we translated a treatment for it seven years ago, way back in 2009 — and not for Lotus Film, the Austrian company releasing it this year.
Projekt: Superwoman was written and directed by Barbara Caspar, an art-house documentary director whose taste seems to lean towards absorbing feminist subjects. Here, she tackles the true and relatively unknown story (especially outside of Spain, where it transpired) of the radical proto-feminist Aurora Rodriguez (23 April 1879 — 28 Dec 1955) and her daughter Hildegart, "the Red Virgin".
Aurora was a firm believer in eugenics who, thanks to an unknown donor found via newspaper advertisements, produced her amazing daughter, Hildegart (born 9 Dec, 1914), a brilliant intellectual prodigy who spoke six languages, possessed a law degree, had written masses of articles and books, and become an international leftist leader all by her late teens. When Hildegart tried to become an independent woman and leave her overbearing and possessive mother for a position as secretary for H.G. Wells, Aurora shot her dead.
To paraphrase the Lotus Film website: Casper's documentary, Projekt: Superwoman, tells the story as a mixture of documentary and animation film; she examines the Rodriguez case and explores the extent to which this story reflects current mother-daughter relationships and modern lifestyles.
The story was previously filmed by the Peru-born Spanish filmmaker and actor Fernando Fernán Gómez (28 Aug 1921 — 21 Nov 2007) in 1977 as Mi hija Hildegart / My Daughter Hildegart (poster above), and as a short film in 2011 by Sheila Pye entitled The Red Virgin — "Red Virgin" being the nickname bequeathed Hildegart while still alive.
The director Boris Undorf, most likely unintentionally, used a riff of the story for his intriguing and unjustly unknown low-budget, US-set horror movie Sonata in 2004.
Trailer to
Boris Undorf's Sonata (2004):
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