Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1994)

Guita Schyfter Insights from an outsider a 8 a eel Bae eo ae i | PRE Sn ek R A. the 1993 Montreal World Film Festival, I spoke with Mexican director Guita Schyfter about her film, Bride To Be/Novia que te vea. The story follows Oshi and Rifke, two young Jewish women growing up in Mexico City during the early 1960s. Conflicts arise when they dare to challenge their families’ conservative traditions. Rifke, an Ashkenazy Jew, breaks a taboo by falling in love with a gentile boy. Oshi, of Turkish Sephardic background, wants to study art at the university instead of getting married without an education. Told in flashback, the film follows Oshi and Rifke’s struggles as they grow into womanhood in a rapidly changing world. Bride To Be recently won the audience prize at the Guadalajara Film Festival, and was well received at San Francisco’s Jewish Film Festival. It has not yet been commercially released in Mexico. In Montreal, it proved so popular with audiences that an extra screening was added. Born in Costa Rica, Guita Schyfter’s parents immigrated from Eastern Europe; her father from Poland, her mother from Ukraine. She studied psychology at a Mexican university and stayed in Mexico upon graduation. After in-service training at England’s Open University, she took an apprenticeship in educational television at the BBC and began working in the field in Mexico. She then moved into documentaries, and from there, into fiction. Bride To Be is Schyfter’s first feature. Kathryn Presner: Has this film caused any controversy in the Jewish community? Guita Schyfter: This is the first [Mexican] film that deals with the Jewish community — or with Jewish characters. The Jewish people I know who have seen it liked it. The authorities of the Jewish community did not support the film. I don’t like to talk about the community as a whole, because there was a group of people who helped me economically as investors in the film. It’s a small group, but they were all Jews. So, I don’t like to generalize. I asked permission to film a synagogue. The president of the Ashkenazy community said I couldn’t film anywhere because there was an intermarriage in the film. And he talked to other Jewish communities. He said to me. ‘I know [intermarriage] happens, but I cannot lend you my synagogue because this is dealt with in the film.’ KP: So you found another way? 12 @ ANGLES “Bride To Be/Novia que te vea”’ GS: You know all these things are very personal. Many irrational and subjective and emotional things go into it. The Mexican [Jewish] community is divided into the Ashkenazy and the Sephardic communities. Each has their own cemetery, schools, synagogues, rabbis, everything. And I’m =. about 50,000 to 60,000 people. Not more than that. There’s not an exact figure, but it’s a small community. Each community has its own president and the three presidents come under one president of what is now called the Central Committee. The president of the Central Committee — it sounds like the old communist party, but it’s not —is the brother of the Rosa Nissan who wrote the book [on which the film is based]. And he was also against the book. Because he did not like the way it portrayed his family. It’s a book about a little girl who is born and grows up in Mexico. It’s the story of Oshi Mataraso, and is partly autobiographical. There are things that if you know the family, you can recognize. And if you’re the brother, I guess you can recognize even more. So he was very against the book. Of course, when the film came out, he also talked to the other communities, so the film was not supported. KP: Did that make things difficult? GS: Yes. First of all it was very sad for me because anybody who read the script or saw the film can see that there’s nothing they should not have supported. I wanted to film in an old, beautiful synagogue in Mexico City, in the downtown. But it was not possible. So I had to change a couple of scenes around because I was not allowed to film in the cemetery either. It hurt me more personally that they would take this attitude than not having those locations, which you can always change or invent. KP: Can you talk about the meaning of the title?