A Witch Story
November's Top 30 Films
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1h 13m
Directed by Yolanda Pividal Garcia • Documentary • 2022 • 73 minutes
Young writer Alice was a teenager when she discovered something that changed her life forever: she was a descendant of Martha Allen Carrier, a woman hanged for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. At 24, after scouring archives, reading academic texts, and compiling hundreds of pages of notes on witch hunts, Alice is ready to share her findings in a book. But before finishing the story, she has some last strings to tie up, which leads her to revisit the last days of Martha in Salem and to reckon with the fact that for millions around the world, Salem is not over.
Alice’s quest to find the truth about Martha and the Trials introduces us to a more unknown and significantly bloodier episode: the Great Witch Hunts of Europe and the Americas, which led to the deaths of roughly 50,000 people, mostly women, between the 16th and 18th centuries.
Departing from a personal quest, and merging with the testimony of Italian feminist scholar Silvia Federici (“Caliban and the Witch”), and the performance of the Spanish artist Esther Musgo, A Witch Story takes on the challenge of retelling and deconstructing the Salem Witch Trials, one of the historical episodes most deeply rooted in American pop culture imagination, to reveal its connection to contemporary witch hunts and examine women’s struggles through a feminist lens.
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