Real Women Have Curves

Eduardo Galeano offers us through his prose and stories mental images of real women—those who could have been, who are, and who walk toward where they want to be.

Through his book Women, we’ve encountered a wealth of sensations and reflections that delicately, and sometimes shamefully, break social paradigms to tell us that real women live among us, think, love, cry, make mistakes. Real women identify with each other while remaining unique.

Real women have curves. In their hips, in their smiles, in their moods, in their conversations, in their ways of thinking and loving.

Why ask for, why seek balance in women?

These days, through the streets of our villainous town, we hear female voices more intensely, female stories, and all those narratives found in the streets, in books, in music and cinema with women as protagonists.

And as if it were one of Galeano’s tales, we encounter this film directed by Colombian Patricia Cardoso and starring three Latinas who open paths and discussions that audiences will have to confront throughout the film.

Women making cinema, with female themes, but concerning us all.

Real Women Have Curves takes us on an existential and deeply personal journey that we experience through Ana, a young Chicana around eighteen years old who must deal with the idea that she probably won’t be able to go to university, plus having to work in a small textile factory to help her sister.

Her struggle becomes evident when confrontations arrive that make visible her dissatisfaction with how her mother sees and idealizes her. A clash between two generations of women representing, in some way, those ambivalent conceptions of femininity.

Within this intimate path that Ana traces for us, we encounter the call of love and sex, the difficulty for a young woman to compose her existence, where education, cultural heritage, identity, race, employment opportunities, and the construction of beauty in a country that lives on appearances intertwine without any truce.

This is a personal film, distinct, unclassifiable, speaking and narrating from authenticity without ever losing that freshness and naturalness of what it means to be a real woman with curves, inhabiting the everyday, far from the “heroine” we’re accustomed to in cinema. Ana doesn’t save anyone’s life, doesn’t start a revolution, isn’t a victim.

She’s a villainous woman who lives in the everyday and can walk upright, head held high, simply because she recognizes herself as she is.