Press

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

As an adolescent in Caracas, Venezuela in the late 80s/early 90s, I had quite a few issues with my body, as most teenage girls do. However, the size of my breasts wasn’t one of them. I’m a B-cup and that was quite normal, not spectacular by any means, but nothing to worry about. I moved to the States in 1993 and since then have returned home to see my family about once a year.

At first my hometown didn’t seem to have changed much during my visits, but about ten years ago I started to notice that women’s breasts were getting larger. I saw it on the streets at first, and then my friends and family started talking about wanting implants. I’d come home to find C and D-cups where As and Bs had been before. None of my women friends in the States would even consider having any kind of plastic surgery, which seems to be the right choice since most of my guy friends profess an intense dislike of any woman whose beauty had been cosmetically altered. More interestingly still, in issues other than plastic surgery, my Venezuelan and my American friends aren’t that different at all.

I was alarmed by the way in which both women and men at home embraced a surgical procedure for the sake of aesthetics, and of course it wasn’t the men who were going under the knife. After my 12-year-old brother told me that he preferred breast implants to real breasts because the implants were perfect, I decided to buy myself a camera and sit down with a few Venezuelans to try to understand the issue. I kept my own views silent and simply asked questions. After an intense seven-day shoot, I came to better understand the phenomenon as the latest development in a culture that while holding records in both Miss Universe and Miss World pageants, has rooted its identity in worshipping the beauty of its women. In order to have a worthy object of worship, however, our society has turned plastic surgery into something not only accepted but longed for and expected. My documentary does not provide any solutions to what most Venezuelans don’t see as a problem anyway, but it hopefully will help audiences better understand why so many women, not only in Venezuela, are happy to risk their lives for the sake of coming closer to what our society deems to be a perfect woman.

PRODUCTION NOTES

A seven-day, family-run video shoot

This documentary was shot during a seven-day visit to see my family in Caracas, one of the most dangerous cities in Latin America. My mother drove me around Caracas to the different interviewee’s homes and workplaces, braving the traffic that can turn a 10-minute drive into a 2-hour ordeal.

My younger brothers, who were 18 and 12 at the time, acted as bodyguards, watching closely as I filmed the crowd shots I felt the documentary needed in order to portray the Venezuelan aesthetic. On various occasions we were approached by concerned citizens who warned us how dangerous it was to be on the streets with what looked like an expensive camera. We tried not to stay in any area for too long, which meant that I couldn’t use my tripod as I shot that footage.

I disdained the tripod altogether during our attempts to capture the copious advertisements around the city that prominently feature women’s breasts. Many of the billboards had to be shot from the highway, so that, as I ran out of the car to the side of the road, cars rushed by, at least when the traffic wasn’t keeping them at a standstill!

Arriving in Venezuela with nothing but my camera and tripod turned the shooting of this, my first documentary, into a family affair, so that the work happily brought me closer to my mother and brothers as we enjoyed the creative process together.