Amy The Legend!
December 16th, 2020, marked 5 years since Amy, the expatriate American, as she is described in Fangoria Magazine, left the remote mountains of Bolivia and changed the chaotic city of La Paz for the equally mountainous terrains of Washington State, in her home country.
A decade earlier, in November of 2005, she visited the ancient mining city of Oruro, in Bolivia, where a friend’s insistence to see a film by Jac Avila, took them to the emerging International Film Festival Diablo De Oro where she saw Jac’s film Martyr, Or The Death of St Eulalia. That event changed her life. Such was the impression she had from that film that she wrote about it in her blog:
Transformation and catharsis in Jac Avila’s Martyr
But what causes someone to transform? If they do it out of necessity, what dictates the necessity? Is it a personal need, such as the character of Camille in Jac Avila’s Martyr? Or is it something greater than themselves? If it’s personal, does that make the transformation narcissistic? And how do we achieve catharsis from transformation?
Martyr is punctuated by photo sessions which provide the structure of Camille’s transformation, and Camille’s subsequent catharsis. In all of Gabrielle’s shoots, we see the camera, the flash, we hear the clicking of the shutter, and the first of Camille’s photoshoots has these elements as well. But as Camille approaches Eulalia through her work in the studio, the camera seems to fade from view, the click of the shutter is less frequent, we pass through the veil into Camille’s private world, where she is becoming Eulalia, and nothing else matters or exists.
Continue reading in her blog
Transformation and catharsis in Jac Avila’s Martyr
I’ve thought a lot lately about what causes a person to transform. I’ve done some transformation myself recently because of my father hav…
Amy Hesketh
Ten years later, in November 2015, Amy was back at that festival in Oruro to present her latest film Olalla, the same film she presented in October of that very year in Mexico, at the Feratum Film Festival, where she experienced another life changing event.
Just before going to the festival in Mexico, she directed Pygmalion and after returning to Bolivia and before the year was over, she played the lead role of the all suffering Justine in Jac’s now classic film based in the famous De Sade’s story.
Those 10 years between 2005 and 2015 were incredibly rewarding and productive for both, Amy and Jac, with 20 movies, 2 per year, and 8 of them mainstream movies that were screened in multiplexes and films festivals. We will explore those rewarding years, the evolution of their work and their influence in Amy’s and our collective future.
