SYCORAX
2021 · 21m · Spain
Directed by Lois Patiño, Matías Piñeiro
Genres: drama, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
A film that gives voice to Sycorax, the voiceless witch of Shakespeare's Tempest, through an audition and a journey with local women across the forests of the Azores.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two experimental filmmakers rescuing a voiceless Shakespearean character by turning her into a forest-dwelling essay—it's radical reclamation theater, but the Azores mythology stuff feels like it's performing its own importance rather than disrupting anything.
Patiño and Piñeiro situate Sycorax within a rigorous lineage of feminist Shakespeare rereadings and essay film, where the audition becomes both formal device and philosophical argument—the Azores landscape becomes text itself, a calculated formal choice that honors both literary tradition and avant-garde cinema.
The decision to let the local women's voices and bodies *be* the audition rather than perform it—that asymmetrical relationship between Shakespearean authority and lived presence—is what makes the small scope of this film crack open into something that feels genuinely recovered.