SYNOPSIS
You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid is a film about the making of a film, and created by Itziar Barrio over sixteen years. It follows the journey of Stella, a revisited character from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) as she navigates through different bodies, cultures, and languages. She leaves New Orleans, Stanley, and their abusive relationship and starts a new life in Bogotá, among the sub-proletarian characters of the Colombian film La Estrategia del Caracol (1993) where her polyamory causes tensions. Later on, in Rome, Stella is a sex worker and the ex-lover of the dissident character of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Accattone (1963).
In You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid, Stella is played by a different actor in each city. Enacting scripts, manifestos, historical events, and being interviewed in front cameras actors assert their subjectivity and agency within existing power dynamics. The script and plot have been written in the exchange between all agents involved, as collective labor. This passage of bodies, languages and characters through movies, cultures and architectures, is an exploration on how identity, labor, class, gender and others, are the subtext of social negotiations.
You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid is part of twelve-year-multi-site project by Itziar Barrio, THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE (2010 - 2022), about the making of a film over time and in real time. In each location, Barrio casts new local actors who work in front of live audiences at times, to develop the scenes and their characters. THE PERILS OF OBEDIENCE merges different media to generate a movie and participating in a larger debate about labor conditions, agency and subjectivity.