SYNOPSIS
What happens when a character decides to escape their own story? Over the course of sixteen years, Itziar Barrio follows Stella —the protagonist of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’— on a journey taking her from New Orleans to Bogotá and Rome. Portrayed by various actresses, Stella crosses physical, cultural, cinematic, and emotional boundaries in search of new ways of existing. Hovering between fiction and para-fiction, You Weren't Familiar but You Weren't Afraid is a reflection on identity, cinema, and the possibility of having agency over our lives.
MORE INFORMATION
You Weren’t Familiar but You Weren’t Afraid is a film about the making of a film, 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 of 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 is 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 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.
https://www.itziarbarrio.com/perils-of-obedience1
https://participantinc.org/seasons/season-20/the-perils-of-obedience-premiere
ITZIAR BARRIO
Itziar Barrio is a filmmaker and an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC. She has been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim fellowship in Film/Video, 2024 NYFA/NYSCA artist fellow and the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome Fellowship (Audiovisuals) in 2018/2019 among many other recognitions. She is a New Museum’s NEW INC alumni, her survey exhibition was curated by Johanna Burton in 2018 and her monograph catalogue was published by international publishing house SKIRA in 2023.
Her films has been shown internationally at CAFA Museum (Beijing), 14th Shanghai Biennale, Salt Istanbul, Onassis Foundation (NYC), PARTICIPANT INC (NYC), MACRO Museum (Rome), e-flux screening room (NYC), Anthology Archives (NYC), Cineteca Madrid, MACBA Museum (Barcelona), Contemporary Art Museum (Belgrade), Museo del Banco de la República (Bogotá), Salzburger Kunstverein, and the Havana Biennial among many other venues.
She is a critic at NYU Steinhardt and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Film and Video Department (2025 - 2026) and has been a seminar leader at Whitney’s ISP Program (2023-2024 & 2024-2025). She teaches classes on film and critical studies at the School of Visual Arts (NYC) and Sarah Lawrence College (NY), and has lectured internationally.
www.itziarbarrio.com