Nona: If They Soak Me, I'll Burn Them is the portrait of Josefina Ramirez, my grandmother. A film that, as a fugue, moves away from the conventions and ways of representing family memory and stories in the first person, thinking of a cinema focused on subjectivities and the non-linear construction of specific biographies.

Thus, the film explores the most disconnected, imaginary, performative, and intriguing sides of Josefina's life, investigating the poetry that emerges from her radicalities and guerrilla-like life.

An existence marked by a class and a race within a country, a territory between mountain ranges and the sea. Camila José DONOSO

Naomi Campbel (2013), Casa Roshell (2017), Nona: If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them (2019)

The Flames of Resistance
Nona: If They Soak Me, I'll Burn Them is a portrait of Josefina Ramírez, the director's grandmother. She had already been part of her filmography as part of the non-professional cast of her debut film, co-directed with Nicolás Videla, Naomi Campbel (2013), where she appeared as the neighbor and accomplice friend of the protagonist Paula Yermén Dinamarca. Here the three of them: Nona, Camila, and Paula, meet again and conjure against the conventions of cinema and the world from a horizontal and disruptive collaboration.

Nona is a 66-year-old woman who lives alone and spends her days doing everything a woman does every day. She is a grandmother, friend, and expert in arming and defending herself with Molotov cocktails, an expertise she cultivated during her youth during the Chilean dictatorship.

This memory of her way of living and resisting under the Pinochet regime seems here to abandon its anchorage in the past and activate itself as a feminist power in the present. Nona is a threat to the patriarchy and the neoliberal status quo and the four wooden houses surrounding her in Pichilemu, where she takes refuge after setting fire to the house of her stalker ex-lover. 

The film embraces fabulously and clings to its right of opacity through multiple types of registers, all that incendiary power that Nona carries and transmits, raising her as a role model for the radical and angry feminism that flourishes today throughout Latin America. Vanja Milena MUNJIN PAIVA

Production Mimbre Films (contacto@mimbreproducciones.cl), Bubbles Project, Altamar Films
International Sales One Eyed Films (info@oneeyedfilms.com)

2019 Mar del Plata IFF Best Film Altered States Competition (Nominee)

2019 IFFR Tiger Award (Nominee)

2019 Transatlantyk Festival Transatlantyk Distribution Award (New Cinema, Nominee)

2019 Valdivia IFF Best Film (Nominee)