This week Irene Baqué came to show us her work for the Guardian, where she specialises in gender equality and womens rights issues. She showed us a couple of examples from the series Speak Your Mind on PTSD and eating disorders, one on the women in El Salvador being imprisoned for having a miscarriage, one on the Central American women searching for their missing children and one on the victims of rubber bullets in Catalonia.
Baqué’s work is largely short-form, with most between five and seven minutes long. Excluding Speak Your Mind, she tackles complex and difficult issues through a small selection of subjects. Most notable in the El Salvador documentary in particular, participants seem to finish each others sentences, creating the impression that their stories are similar and this is a widespread issue, part of a bigger problem.
Motion graphics are used to great effect to present facts and figures to the audience. The El Salvador documentary is almost entirely in subtitles, but Baqué narrates in English, reading out people’s experiences as the handwritten text in Spanish appears to be etched into the walls and buildings. Speak Your Mind takes a slightly different approach, but is similarly effective – a handwritten style of text is overlayed over buildings with specific words underlined and emphasised in colour to keep it aesthetically interesting.
