POV: Ella Es El Matador (She Is the Matador)

When you’re looking at the bull, it’s like you’re looking at yourself, because in front of the bull, there’s no place to hide. There’s no room to fool yourself because you’re facing life and death.

— Eva Florencia

“It was like an arrow straight to my heart,” Eva Florencia says intently. “I was really moved when I saw this giant bull go after the matador’s red muleta and brush past his chest. The bullfighter struck a forced but beautiful pose. Right then, I understood there was something beyond the cruelty that people spoke of. There was a connection between man and beast.” As aspiring professional matador Florencia speaks, she points out how her belief in this connection shapes her life. With a coffee cup featuring a drawing of a bull and a photo of a bullfighter on her refrigerator (“This keeps me from eating too much and getting out of shape”), even her morning routine is organized around her dream.

One of two women at the center of Gemma Cubero and Celeste Carrasco’s documentary, Ella Es El Matador (She Is the Matador), Florencia is visibly determined even as the reasons for her infatuation remain elusive. Her devotion to the art and culture of Spanish bullfighting emerged when she was a child in Florence, Italy. Her parents, Domenico and Mirella, here testify to their early hopes that she would get over the idea, but once she left home for Sevilla, they knew they would be unable to stop her. Now, though he travels to Spain to watch her perform, they remain doubtful of her risky vocation. Her mother sighs, “When Eva left home so suddenly, it was such a hard time. The bond between us was broken.”

This is not the case for Maripaz Vega, who came up in a family of bullfighters. Family photo suggest she was a determined child (“I fought my first bull when I was nine,” she declares). Though her brothers and father aspired to become a professional, she is the only member of the family who has achieved that end, currently the “only active female professional matador in the world.” She’s supported on the road by her father and her brother Koke, who performs as her assistant (apoderado) in the ring. Scrubbing her jacket by hand, he smiles ironically: “This is the worst part of bullfighting.”

Koke’s respect for and devotion to his sister is of a piece with his passion for bullfighting. Such passion remains perplexing to those outside the culture, and Ella Es El Matador does not explain or explore the phenomenon per se. Made over some nine years, the film’s approach to this question is indirect, using multiple still photo series to suggest the art (the theatrical posing and the essential drama) of bullfighting, as well as the women’s own descriptions of their feelings in the ring. “The bull is a part of me,” says Florencia, “He makes me dream, laugh, cry. He takes my breath away.” Standing before a painting of a bull, she appears as enraptured as she sees herself.

For all her fervor and commitment, Florencia remains an outsider in traditional world of bullfighting. Fermín Cebolla, author of Lady Bullfighter, observes that women have participated since the 13th century (“Nuns themselves fought the bulls!”), yet they were subject to bans “during military dictatorships.” In 1974, Angela Hernández successfully sued (using a law protecting women in the workplace) to relax a law that had been in place since 1908. Now women can again appear in the ring. As retired matador Cristina Sánchez sees it, this shift opened the way for another struggle. “When a man has a bad day, people say, ‘Too bad, he’ll have better days.’ When a woman has a bad day, instead you hear, ‘We knew it. She’s not capable.’ They bury you and each time you have to climb out of the coffin and fight again.”

The film’s focus on this struggle — captured indirectly, in Vega and Florencia’s daily efforts to pursue their dreams — leaves out other questions about bullfighting more broadly. Domenico does note that some viewers see bullfighting as a bloodsport, but as he has observed the crowds at his daughter’s fights, he sees people who “are not bloodthirsty. They have come here for something else. I’m not quite sure what it is.”

The film leaves open the question of what they come for. Neither does it press the women to explain their own visions and commitments. “We all believe that the bull is born to die in the ring,” says Vega. “We don’t feel bad about killing him, but it must be an honorable death, a quick painless death.” The brief scenes of fights in Ella Es El matador do not indicate the long times it can take to kill bulls, the blood and the injury resulting from a fight. Instead, it assumes the women’s view of their profession. “The person who wants to be a matador,” insists Florencia, “is searching beyond themselves, to reach past human limitations.” Just how those limitations are overcome by bullfighting remains unclear.