Antonella Sudasassi Furniss’s second feature, Memories of a Burning Body, has opened to UK cinemas this week. In 2024, it took home the Berlinale Panorama and Busan Flash Forward Audience Awards and has been selected as the Costa Rican entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards. The film centres on a series of imagined conversations with the director’s grandmother, exploring her upbringing within a deeply conservative Costa Rican culture. But this isn’t a fiction film: the protagonist, Mayela, is a composite constructed from conversations with over 15 women that Antonella gathered during her research. While the story that we hear is based on the lives of three of those women, in particular, she embodies the voices of a generation of Costa Rican women whose physical, emotional and social autonomy were limited by patriarchal norms.
Antonella’s first feature, The Awakening of Ants, premiered at the Berlinale 2019, and was also selected as the Costa Rican entry for the Academy Awards in the same year. It screened at over 65 international film festivals and received 15 international awards, also becoming the first Central American film to receive a Goya Award nomination and to win a Platino Award.
Memories of a Burning Body trailer courtesy of Cinélatino via YouTube
Agnès: Can you tell me about your writing process for this project. I’m curious about the relationship between fiction and reality in this story and whether you put any of yourself into this character?
Antonella: These are genuinely their voices – this is all in their own words. I didn’t change what they shared with me at all. There was a lot of work in the writing, since I had testimonies from so many women, each sharing different experiences. I chose to weave their stories together mainly to protect them. In Costa Rica, talking about these things is taboo, and for many of these women, it was their first time speaking about these topics. They hadn’t talked about this with their daughters, granddaughters, even their own mothers or sisters.
I spoke to women from very different backgrounds, both economically and socially. Some women had been to university; some hadn’t. Some were from cities, while others were from smaller towns. One was very economically comfortable; another had spent her life in and out of prison. She’d been a prostitute and had given birth seven or eight times while incarcerated. Many of the women I spoke with had very different opportunities. One woman divorced her husband because he didn’t satisfy her sexually - she was very sexually liberal for the time and had relationships with women after leaving him. After talking to these women for so long, I started to recognise some basic core experiences, even though the contexts were different. This sense of not understanding what was happening to their bodies kept recurring. It was this common experience of being a woman that I felt I had to articulate with the film.
By intertwining their experiences, I made it so that no single story stands out as any one person’s. They trusted me with their stories and this way, there are no personal details that could identify them—just shared memories and experiences brought together as one narrative. So, yes, I was the one who chose what made it into the film and what didn’t. But in the end, these are all their real stories, their real voices. It’s truly about them.
Still courtesy of Bendita Film Sales/Variety
Agnès: We observe the different stages of Mayela’s life through her memories in the film. In her early years, sexuality is very much present, both in the form of a natural curiosity about her body and boys, both of which she is made to feel ashamed of – and also the sexual acts of adults that she is witness to but can’t speak of. What the film does so effectively, is demonstrate how sexuality becomes intertwined with feelings of guilt and shame.
Antonella: Throughout my work I have been deeply interested in the topic of women’s sexuality. In 2016, I made a short film about sexuality in childhood, The Awakening of the Ants: Childhood, before The Awakening of Ants feature in 2019, which was about the way that motherhood affects your relationship with sexuality and the way that you are perceived in society.
I think many women relate to feelings of guilt – and also of shame which is heavier. Guilt, in particular, can deeply impact our sense of self, how we view ourselves, relate to the world and feel we belong in it. These feelings are often tied to the experience of being a woman.
Memories of a Burning Body started as a personal quest – to dignify sexuality at all ages. I’d had this idea to talk about sexuality in the different stages of a woman’s life. We are not used to seeing our grandmothers as desirable, sexually active women, we tend to see them as saints, as these untouchable figures. But the relationship that a granddaughter can have with her grandmother is different from the one between mothers and daughters. There’s this sense of apapachar, as we say in Costa Rica, unconditional love.
I started the film by trying to understand how it could have been for my grandmothers. Initially, I spoke with my grandmother who was already 92, but I couldn’t fully grasp her experience – she was having issues with her memory and our conversations weren’t very extensive. That was when I expanded the conversation out to other women and from there, the film started to take shape.
Still courtesy of Bendita Film Sales/Variety
Agnès: Mayela’s identity was shaped in a time when marital duty overshadowed personal choice, and consent was framed more as an obligation than a right. The notion of marital rape didn’t formally exist as a legal or even social concept in many places until well into the 20th century. In such a context, leaving a marriage – especially one marked by violence or unhappiness – was incredibly difficult, and actively discouraged, as we see in the film. What do you think allowed her, or women like her, to find the courage to leave despite these pressures?
Antonella: The question that their stories brought to me was, how on earth was this not considered rape? But at the time, it wasn’t – not legally, not socially, nothing. It was just seen as an obligation, something assumed in marriage. These women were really the first generation of women to able to get a divorce. Although divorce was legalised in Costa Rica in the 19th Century, it was granted for limited reasons and was highly stigmatised, it was like a scarlet letter. Costa Rica is a Catholic country by law, by constitution – and marriage was a covenant ordained by God. So, these women had never believed that they had a choice to get free. As the character says, ‘I had never considered myself to be the kind of person to get a divorce,’ and yet she does.
In the film, I chose to focus on some of the harder topics, but I could have used a lot more of the violence that was described to me during the interviews. I decided not to because I also wanted to prioritise the humour and positive aspects that make up a life. There’s one phrase which I used in the film, which I think summarises it - it goes something like: ‘I love being a woman. I wouldn’t ask to be anything else, but it has a dark side, which is to be very vulnerable.’
Agnès: Let’s go back to guilt – as guilt is one of the things that Mayela is reflecting on in the film. She notes that we are taught to feel guilt, but not how to deal with it.’ I don’t think other religions frame sin in quite the same way as Christianity – and it’s amazing how deeply embedded these feelings can be in a culture – so that even after so much personal and societal change, it’s something that still torments Mayela.
Antonella: I myself wasn’t raised especially Catholic, but I was baptised and confirmed at 15. Even though my environment wasn’t very religious – we didn’t go to church regularly or partake in religious activities – I still feel like it was very much connected to the core of how I grew up. Everything we learn is categorised through the lens of good and bad and I certainly had to go through a process of rethinking that morality.
The original idea for the film was to explore sexuality in older age because I wanted to understand how people experience their sexuality as they get older. What is it like to have sex at 70 or 80? These are things we rarely talk about and questions I didn’t have answers to. From the start though, I realised that the film wasn’t just about the present moment – it was very much about understanding how these women had arrived at this point in their lives. It’s a process of exploring how they experience their bodies now, given the restrictions, violence and frustrations that they’ve encountered over the years. All of this shapes how they perceive their sexuality today.
Still courtesy of Bendita Film Sales
I feel so much appreciation for the film – because although I made it, I am also a spectator in it, hearing these stories for the first time and confronting myself with them, this could have been the life of my grandmother. I’ve come to see it as a journey into the past to understand where we stand now, recognising that they had to go through all of this for us to have the freedoms we do today. It’s a journey to the past that helps us appreciate the present and reminds us to never forget so we don’t end up repeating the same cycles.
Agnès: Can you talk about the decision to use fiction to tell this story? I think that watching it, it is very easy to overlook the fact that this is a documentary because we feel so invested in this woman as a character, or to assume that this is one woman’s story reenacted by actors.
Antonella: I initially considered this film a documentary, but when it premiered, it was categorised as a fiction film and actually won the Audience Award for Best Feature at Berlinale. Now, it's being shown in the documentary competition at another film festival, so it’s been perceived both as fiction and documentary. For me, throughout the development process, it was always a documentary. From the start, I knew the subject matter would be challenging to address; the women I was speaking with wouldn’t be able to appear on camera, and I needed to protect their identities.
That led to a significant formal challenge. I could have taken many different approaches, but I had this sense that it was very important to show the skin of an older woman – her nudity – on camera. Actually, someone asked Sol in an interview recently whether it was difficult to get naked for the film, and she replied that the whole process had felt like being in the nude - because these women had opened up in ways they never had before. I loved that concept: the film is about exposing oneself, emotionally and physically, and I wanted to highlight the dignity of the older female body, which is often marginalised or overlooked in film.
Seeing the skin of the actress was important to me because it’s not common in cinema. Women are often made to feel unattractive or invisible after a certain age, and I wanted to defy that. Putting her body on screen was a way to dignify and celebrate it, to force the audience to engage with something that’s typically avoided.
Agnès: The film unfolds within a single house, with Mayela moving through the same rooms during her childhood, adolescence, married life, and older years. This creative decision blurs the lines between different stages of her life, visually collapsing time into one shared space. Why did you choose to use the same set to represent all the places Mayela lived, and what does the house represent to you?
Antonella: The blending of past and present was an essential part of how I wanted to portray memory. One of the women used the phrase, “Time is not linear, it's like a bubble,” and that idea stayed with me: memories are not bound by time; they live and come to life when recalled. So, for me, everything needed to exist in one place, in one house. I love the idea of the house serving as a metaphor for the protagonist's mind. Each door opens to a different part of her memory, like different sections of her brain. The house transforms from a bedroom to a hospital room, from a garage to a fair, and even includes a school—all within the same space.
Shooting everything in one location forced the whole team to be incredibly creative. We had to figure out how to turn a small room into a classroom, for example. It was a choreography between the crew, the talent, and the space itself, where past and present could coexist – both a conceptual and a practical challenge, but one that felt necessary to capture the essence of Mayela’s past and the nature of memory itself. Memory is never entirely clear; it’s always a bit nebulous. In this way, the house itself became a character in the film, reflecting the shifting and fragmented nature of memory.
Agnès: In another interview, you mentioned that you wanted the film to confront the past. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 and in light of Trump’s re-election last week, discussions about women’s autonomy and control over their bodies feel more urgent than ever. Do you worry that we are regressing into more conservative territory?
Antonella: It’s a constant concern. Politically, we see the resurgence of very conservative leaders from time to time – and progress is not always universal. For some of us, progress feels tangible, especially in the context of films and media, but for many women, progress hasn’t reached them yet. There's a constant struggle for power, and every time we make progress, there’s always something pushing us back. Every step forward seems to be met with resistance.
We must remain vigilant and keep fighting for our rights. If we don’t, things easily go backwards. We’ve seen this with Roe v. Wade, and it’s reflected in the real-life horror stories that unfold every day, like the femicides in Costa Rica, which continue to rise. Sometimes, it may feel like progress has been made, but for many, it hasn't. There’s always this ongoing power struggle. That’s why it’s so important to stay informed, especially for young women who might not feel the urgency of knowing this history. If we don't, we risk losing the progress we’ve fought so hard to achieve.
Agnès Houghton-Boyle is a critic and programmer based in London. Her writing features in Talking Shorts Magazine and Fetch London.
