Clarisa Navas is an Argentinean director, scriptwriter, producer, teacher and writer who develops a style of filmmaking with a class and gender perspective, out of passion and conviction. Her films promote the processes of collective creation as a driving force and lever for transformation. A “located” form of filmmaking, from a specific place (Corrientes, her hometown in the northeastern province of Argentina), which allows her to create from a knowledge that goes beyond the intellectual, a knowledge that emerges from the skin, from the land, from emotion and sensations. Her films start from the concrete to connect with the audience in a universal way.
Her two feature films Hoy partido a las 3 (2017) and Las mil y una (2020) are an ode to women, human relationships, diversity and the struggle to develop experiences that fall outside mainstream patterns and conventions.
This multifaceted creator holds a degree in Audiovisual Arts from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), is an instructor at the Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización Cinematográfica (ENERC), directs the ABC BAFICI (ABC Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival) section for project development and, since 2010, is part of the Yaguá Pirú Cine collective, dedicated to the invention of other ways of making films in the northeast of Argentina and Paraguay.
In 2011 Clarisa shot her first feature-length documentary, Retratos de otro país, which took her to explore the remote places of Argentina: indigenous communities, rural populations and social environments that organise themselves on the margins of institutional systems and which led her to question her political vision of cinema and the meaning she wanted to imprint on it. This passion for people, especially women, and also for the boundaries as a space that dilutes identities to make them authentic, is what almost all of her works exude: the documentary Los guarangos (2012), the documentary series Mujeres entre fronteras (2018-2017), or the fiction series Río atrevido (2022).
Hoy partido a las 3 was born from the premise of the documentary and is transformed into a fiction through the collective enthusiasm of its protagonists, all of them football players from Clarisa’s own team and others nearby. With this she talks about the difficulties that women who play this sport have, but not only that, but also about how women relate to each other and how they organise themselves to overcome these difficulties, both in sport and in everyday life with a festive look.
In 2020, her fiction feature film, Las mil y una, is the opening screening in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival – Berlinale. Las Mil is the neighbourhood where Clarisa grew up in Corrientes. The director returns to it to revisit the places that emotionally shaped her. Once again, her commitment to creation is evident in her choice of these places as the basis for the construction of stories. She draws on emotions that she has already fully inhabited to “tell from within”, since only from that place inside Navas feels the legitimacy to construct genuine and honest visions and stories. These experiences of love, friendship and family are the ones that nourish this multi-award winning film.
Clarisa Navas is a reference for the present and the future. A way of understanding cinema and the world that offers us the possibility of inhabiting more liveable spaces, even if they are still harsh and violent, but where other ways of being and existing are shown. We at Zinegoak would like to thank her for her artistic work and honour her political and social commitment with our highest award.