As reported by the website of the journal Mujeres: "Laura de la Uz, Isabel Santos, Luis Alberto García, Jorge Perugorría and Mario Guerra are the actors and actresses with whom filmmaker Marylin Solaya will work in her first feature, Vestido de novia".
With this film the director of several documentaries, among them the many-awarded and polemic En el cuerpo equivocado (In the Wrong Body), turns her glance to the groups of gender problems and sexual diversity in the Cuban context, themes that have marked her career since she was a theater student.
Vestido de novia handles the story of two transsexual women in 1994, a period that marked the country economically and socially. One of them has been reassigned the feminine sex – the role is to be interpreted by Laura de la Uz – and the other, who anxiously awaits the operation, will be played by Isabel Santos.
The presence of these two well-known actresses in the leading roles is not casual. The filmmaker seeks support in them to achieve a truthful interpretation of a complex event that aims at being understood in its full dimension. Besides, they enable her to present the characters in their entire femininity, since that is how they assume themselves and how they feel, regardless of being misunderstood and humiliated in the process of achieving their fullness as human beings with the sexual and gender identity they have chosen.
In the film, the director also pretends to emphasize on the masculine role, on the way a man can assimilate, after several years of marriage, that his wife was not born with the feminine reproductive organs. This role will be played by Luis Alberto García, again in a character that will demand his best histrionic capacity to convince a heterogeneous, mainly patriarchal and male chauvinistic public.
Marylin Solaya, when glancing at this other aspect, also shows concern for the masculinities, since gender problems are not exclusive of women but are also faced by men, who have to oppose the stereotypes with which society has marked their behavior and the way they assume certain attitudes and feelings.
The director aims at achieving a film that will not only be a study of transsexuality but a story about human beings who, under difficult situations, try above all to be happy.
Author
Laura Paz
