Génesis Valenzuela began her studies at the school of fine arts in her country, the Dominican Republic. She later enrolled in the film directing program at the Altos de Chavón school. Genesis’ early films explore themes related to the countryside and inequality from a poetic and essayistic approach. After emigrating to Spain, where she completed a master’s degree in experimental film at the Zine Eskola Elías Querejeta, she began working on projects that address issues such as uprooting, racism, and the colonization of the Antilles. Her short film Canto Errante (2022) was a THFF24 selection.
In 1992, Lucrecia Pérez, a 33-year-old woman, leaves her hometown in the Dominican Republic to seek a better life in Spain. But a month after arriving in Madrid, she is murdered by a group of young neo-Nazis. Five hundred years earlier, Christopher Columbus arrived at Lucrecia’s island (then called Aytí) on a voyage funded by the Spanish crown. It marked the beginning of a colonial system that violently gave rise to a new social model on the island (then renamed Hispaniola), composed of whites, indigenous people, and enslaved black Africans.
In A Freedom Struggle: Looking for Lucrecia Pérez, artist and filmmaker Génesis Valenzuela proposes the challenge of investigating the colonial wound and its echoes in the present through the human body. As part of the process of developing a feature-length documentary based on the case of the murder of Lucrecia Pérez, she expands her exploration into the performative gesture, choosing the market space—through pictorial representations from the colonial era and images and sounds of the present—as a crucible from which to reflect on identity, race, and representation in the Antilles.
A Q+A with Génesis Valenzuela will follow the performance.
