Las hijas del fuego
Director: Albertina Carri
Writer: Albertina Carri, Analía Couceyro
Cast: Disturbia Rocío, Violeta Valiente, Rana Rzonscinsky, Ivanna Colona Olsen, Carla Morales Ríos, Erica Rivas, Sofía Gala, Cristina Banegas
Part of: Viennale
Seen on: 5.11.2018
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Plot:
Two women on a road trip: one wants to shoot a porn film, the other wants to see her family. They used to be lovers once, now they are again. They pick up a third woman and as they drive through Souther Argentina, they meet more women, discovering themselves and each other through sex, talking and traveling together.

Las hijas del fuego is basically high concept porn. Some parts of it worked for me, others didn’t so much. But it’s an interesting attempt in any case.

Las hijas del fuego looks at bodies and porn through a queer lens, which I definitely appreciated – more often than not we get the straight perspective on queer sex, usually a fetishizing and/or exoticizing approach. That is definitely not the case here. Plus, the film has a sense of humor, which is (almost) always a plus when combined with porn.

They also try to show some diversity in the people and bodies portrayed in the film, including for example more than one fat woman. That is great, but at the same time, all the women here were cis, young, abled and almost all of them were white. In short, they could have gone further here.

I was also taken aback that there was a scene where people are drugged without their knowledge and that isn’t an issue, it just leads to a huge party as if it was the most normal thing in the world. That is definitely not okay.

On a more theoretical level, there were also some intersting approaches here, particularly in the way the film draws parallels between bodies and landscapes: bodies as landscapes and landscapes as bodies. Sentences like “representation of a body is never the problem, it’s about how we divide them into landscapes and territories” (quoted not entirely verbatim, I’m afraid) are worth mulling over and thinking about, although I am not sure how much I actually agree.

But in the end, I think I would have liked more theory and less sex. I just quickly grow bored with watching sex scenes (well, at least in a full cinema), so that’s always a challenge when it comes to watching porn in public, especially when the movie has other things to offer as well.

Summarizing: there are some parts of interest here, but it just didn’t work in its entirety for me.