Por la flor de la canela
2012 · 19m · España
Directed by María Sánchez Testón
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
A journey through songs about sexist violence from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century warns that many familiar songs are sung without truly being heard.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise reads like a sermon—songs as vessels of ideology, violence as historical throughline—but the execution could either be genuinely subversive or just well-intentioned pedagogy, and I'd need to see if Testón actually dismantles the folk-song fetish or just nags us about it.
A rigorously constructed essay film that positions itself squarely in the lineage of political documentary and feminist historiography, using the archive of song as primary text to excavate what we've been singing past for centuries—formally disciplined work that understands how form itself can be an argument.
The genius move here is likely in how Testón lets the *gap between melody and meaning* do the heavy lifting—whether through juxtaposition of lyrics with historical image, or a decision about when to let the song continue uninterrupted versus when to cut it—that single structural choice probably carries the entire moral weight.