Sandra Reynoso Estrada
, a Mexican filmmaker, decided to explore the hardships faced by children who have been sexually abused and her film, Videotape , has made her the only Latin American nominated to the 2019 BAFTA Student Film Awards .
Videotape
is a short film that tells the story of two girls who are forced to face the horrors of sexual abuse when one of them is attacked by her uncle.
Sandra Reynoso
says that “what I'm trying to tell is the story of thousands of girls and boys (…) the story takes place in the 90s, when many political and social events take place, in the midst of a crisis .”
The story revolves around the victim and her friend, who want revenge but in the end, they have to reconsider their plan.
The short film is also nominated at the Ariel 2019 Awards and is part of the official selection at the Shanghai Film Festival .
For the director , “talking about sexual abuse is very important, it's a very serious and heinous crime , It is something that transgresses the victim's world and affects them for life. It is a topic that is not often discussed, as only one in every 100 cases is denounced ; since the attackers are part of the nuclear family, it is very easy to commit it against children.”
While Reynoso was working on the project, she found that in 2015, when the project started, that Mexico was the third pace in child sexual abuse and now, the country occupies the first place in child sexual abuse and it also is the first consumer of child pornography .
This terrible reality pushed Reynoso to give visibility to this crime and to help prevent it.
Videotape
was screened for the first time at the 2018 Morelia International Film Festival and was also screened at the Shanghai International Film Festival .
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