oriana (2022) — beatriz santiago muñoz

united states, dcp, 78 mins.

A band of feminist warriors takes refuge in an abundant Puerto Rican landscape in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s feature-length film. Following the artist’s friends and collaborators in and around San Juan in the wake of Hurricane Maria, Oriana takes inspiration from Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères, which envisions the aftermath of a violent war of the sexes in a future where women have toppled the patriarchy. In a filmic space of everyday survival and collective invention, Oriana is less a speculative vision about what might be and more a provocation of how other futures are actualized in the present.