‘I had two kids and didn’t know what an orgasm was’: the Costa Rican film giving grandmothers a voice

Costa Rican director Antonella Sudasassi Furniss explains why her docu-fiction about the sexual lives of an earlier generation of women is also a story for today

‘Women are always burning inside,” says Antonella Sudasassi Furniss, over video call from Costa Rica. So they were in her 2019 debut as a writer and director, The Awakening of the Ants, in which a mother maddened by patriarchal oppression lays waste to a birthday cake at a children’s party.

And so they are in Furniss’s docufiction follow-up about the pleasures and horrors of female sexuality, Memories of a Burning Body. A hybrid documentary of the conversations she “never had with my grandmothers”, it uses voice recordings of three mature women – Ana (68), Patricia (69) and Mayela (71) – embodied on screen by 65-year-old actor Sol Carballo.

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‘I had two kids and didn’t know what an orgasm was’: the Costa Rican film giving grandmothers a voice

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