Something to Sea
In her coastal Chilean town, Julieta is the only woman on the boat crews that venture out on the ocean each day trawling for fish. Gloria faithfully tends her brother’s empty grave in the symbolic cemetery that overlooks the sea. Both remarkable women’s stories are told in a short documentary titled, “The Women and the Sea.”
Camila
Guarda But there’s a Velasco third remarkable woman: The one holding the camera.
Her name is Camila Guarda Velasco, and her documentary was just screened at the Milwaukee Film Festival in May. “Nobody is more shocked than me of where this little film has gone to,
Julieta is the only fisherwoman among a slew of men who venture onto the ocean each day to fish. Julieta is featured in the documentary “The Women and the Sea” by UWM journalism, advertising, and media studies lecturer Camila Guarda Velasco. Photo courtesy of Camila Guarda Velasco.
6 • IN FOCUS • June, 2021
and now here, in the Milwaukee Film Festival? I’m so, so happy,” she said.
In addition to being a documentarian, Guarda Velasco is a former television reporter and a current instructor in UWM’s Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program, where she teaches documentary filmmaking, broadcast journalism, and visual storytelling. “The Women and the Sea” is her first film, and it’s already garnered several awards and has been shown at domestic and international screenings. And it all started as a thesis project. From filming to festival Guarda Velasco is from Chile. She spent seven years as a broadcast journalist covering breaking news all around Latin America, but the constraints of journalism – like the fact that she rarely had time to take deep dives into any one story – inspired her to look
for a change of pace. She found it in Northwestern University’s MFA program for Documentary Filmmaking. “The Women and the Sea” is Guarda Velasco’s final project for her MFA, earned in 2019. In the final year of the program, students are tasked with creating their own short documentaries. During her time as a reporter, Guarda Velasco had heard of “symbolic cemeteries,” which honor those who died at sea, their bodies unrecovered. “I thought, wow, that’s so evocative, to have these empty tombs for these fishermen overlooking the ocean. In our MFA, when they told us to start thinking about what story we wanted to tell, I immediately started thinking of that one,” she said.
