Cinema Mentiré brings to The Garden Cinema the new restorations of Nobody's Wife (1982) and Miss Mary (1986) by trailblazing feminist Argentinian filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg (1922-1995). Bemberg had a gift for telling meaningful stories, focusing on the lives and struggles of women while painting a picture of Argentina's political context. Her vision has been a significant contribution to Argentinian identity and cinema, and it is relevant to remember her on the 50th anniversary of the last dictatorship. The double bill is part of the UK-wide retrospective Daring to Dare: The Films of María Luisa Bemberg, celebrating her legacy on the 30th anniversary of her passing in 2025.
Leonor is an upper-middle-class, committed housewife whose comfortable life falls apart when she learns of her husband’s infidelity. With more fear than conviction, she sets out on a voyage of self-discovery. It is an act born of integrity, a refusal to live a lie, but as her encounters with family and economic institutions reinforce her social non-existence, it becomes a gesture of active resistance. Made under the military regime, the story of Leonor’s move from a family home and a blind life centred on pleasing others to a desire to create a life outside “the system” was dangerously challenging to the symbolic order in place. Bemberg struggled for five years to get her script approved by censors, who saw her criticism extending from family to state, and Leonor as an emblem of rupture.
The film will be preceded by an introduction by the Cinema Mentiré team.
