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HBO: How did you learn about the pageant?
Isabel Vega:I'm from Colombia originally. My family still
lives there. I had been researching the idea of
beauty pageants, how it's an obsession in
Latin America. I read somewhere that
Colombia's National Beauty Pageant receives
more viewers than World Cup Soccer. So it's
a huge phenomenon down there. And while I
was down there, I came across an article
about one in the prison. It seemed fascinating
to me. I'd worked with Amanda before, and I
really liked her work, and so I pitched it to
her. And we just decided to fly down to
Colombia and take a chance.
We did as much research as we could, but
when we got there, it was completely different
than what we expected. It was more like a
school than a prison. Women don't have
uniforms. They have a beauty salon, a gym.
It's a much more humane prison system.
Amanda Micheli: But it's misleading, because we then found
out that the reason they're not in uniforms is
because the prison system is so broke.
Colombia has a very complicated political
situation, and the country has been torn
apart by armed an civil conflict for over forty
years. And there's a lot of poverty. There's
narco-trafficking. There's a lot of money
coming in and out of the country. But the
average person is really struggling. And in the
midst of this armed conflict, the men are
getting killed, they're going to jail, and the
women get involved in criminal activity to
survive. And that was the thing that was hard
to take, because a lot of these girls have kids.
And they're getting involved in criminal
activities just trying to survive.
Isabel Vega: And because it is a third world country, most
of these girls come from nothing. And for an
uneducated young girl from a small village,
what they have to look forward to are these
pageants that maybe will take them from their
village to a city, and to a better life. They
might become television hostesses or models.
So for them, a pageant is kind of an escape.
It's this one moment where they can be free,
even if it's just for a day.
HBO: What surprised you most in making the film? .
Isabel Vega: The women themselves - the types of crimes
they committed, and how young they were.
We have one girl in the film who's a guerilla,
and one who's a hitwoman. And they're in
their twenties. The life they've gone through!
And then you look at the types of sentences
these women got. The one who'd killed many
people was sentenced to eight years. And
then the guerilla who hadn't done a thing but
was a member of the FARC was in for thirteen
years. So when you look at it, the sentences
they got didn't always match their crimes.
Amanda Micheli: There's no trial by jury. You just go and face a
judge, and he decides how long you're going to
be in for. And while you're waiting for that
trial by judge, you're sitting in jail the whole
time. But the ironies are so crazy too, because
part of the thing that was hardest to stomach
was the fact that for a lot of them, life is better
inside the prison, than it was outside. So on
the one hand, it's messed up that they don't
get a trial by jury, and they have to sit in jail,
but certainly with many of the women that we
talked to, they were safer on the inside than
on the outside.
Isabel Vega: It's often more humane in prison. And I have
to say, they are trying to change that, in
Colombia. They're working so that women will
only be there at most a month, and then go to
trial. But it's a slow process.
HBO: Why was this story important for you to tell?
Isabel Vega: For me, I wanted to connect with the culture.
I left Colombia when I was seven, and it was a
chance for me to find a story I felt passionate
about. I was interested in the political conflict
that was going on, and how it was affecting
the civilians. But I didn't know what kind of
story we were going to get. I knew we had a
beginning, middle and an end, but I had no
idea what kind of women we were going to
find. I think we got incredibly lucky. What I
like people to take away from the film is the
passion that these women have for life. It's a
search for freedom in the most unlikely place
ever, a prison.
Amanda Micheli: I'm really drawn to women's stories. All the
films I've worked on have investigated how
women identify themselves through gender
and their bodies, and, in this case, how these
women identify themselves through beauty
was really fascinating. They're in really tough
circumstances, coming from a really
complicated social situation. I didn't want to
go in with preconceived ideas about what that
would mean. Beauty pageants are something
we think of as a superficial, even
dehumanizing thing. In American culture, I
think everyone jokes about beauty queens and
that whole culture. But to these girls, this
was something incredibly meaningful. So that
was surprising.
For me, when we're pitching films to HBO or
anyone else, we're not pitching so much an
idea or a thesis. You're pitching a gamble.
You're hoping that you find people whose
stories are a microcosm for the macrocosm.
And you just never really know what you're
going to get. It's not like we had a proposal
that laid out exactly what we thought beauty
pageants meant in Colombian culture and
how audiences might connect with that. We
both really had open minds about what the
story might be. And you don't really know 'til
you get there.
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