Marlén Viñayo is a TV and film director, producer, and documentary screenwriter based in El Salvador. She has worked for PBS Frontline, BBC News, and CCTV Americas Now, among others. In 2016 Viñayo founded her production company, La Jaula Abierta. “Cachada: The Opportunity” is her first feature documentary film as a director.

“Cachada: The Opportunity” will premiere at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival on March 10.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

MV: “Cachada” tells the story of five Salvadoran street vendors who formed a theater company to bring their own life stories to the stage. The process of creating their play requires them to face their pasts, traumas, and secrets, and during the rehearsals they discover themselves as victims and victimizers in a cycle of violence that has plagued their families for generations.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

MV: I met the film’s characters in 2010, when I traveled from Spain to El Salvador to film my thesis, a short documentary film for the Association CINDE, a local NGO focused on the care of street vendors’ children. Magaly, Magda, Ruth, Chileno, and Wendy were some of these women.

It was the first time that I visited Central America and I ran into a reality that was completely foreign to me. I was 23 then, and I was shocked to meet women who were similar ages that had completely different lives. They had several kids, but they were shy women who barely raised their eyes with low self-esteem and only one thought in their heads: to raise their kids as well as they could. I found an astonishing and atrocious reality.

It seemed that in this social strata, women’s lives were a fabric where the stories were destined to be repeated in a circle again and again: to be born, to have children, to raise them, and to struggle to survive — as their mothers and grandmothers did before, and as their daughters probably will– and that’s it. That’s what her whole life is about.

Three years later, I returned to El Salvador and met them again, but this time they were on stage. Those shy and insecure women had formed a theater company called “La Cachada Teatro” and presented their first play, a small theatrical experiment in which they portrayed their own experiences, at the markets and at home, on stage.

I was amazed. They were completely different women than the ones I had met. What had happened? How was this change possible? That amazement was the initial reason why I felt interested in telling their story.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

MV: El Salvador is a country mainly known for its stories of violence related to war or gangs, but with this film I would like the audience to be aware that there is another type of violence that normally remains invisible and that affects a large part of Salvadoran women — a violence so prevalent, so systematic, and so socially accepted, that it reproduces from generation to generation. Breaking these cycles of violence is related to becoming consciously aware of repeating and perpetuating them.

I would like “Cachada” to work as an example of an experiment through which theater empowers a group of women to discover their voice and lets them rediscover and understand themselves. [Theater also allows them to] become aware of the effects their violent realities have produced on them and on their children and enables them to successfully fight and break that perverse generational inheritance.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

MV: “Cachada” is my first feature film, and it was a tough road for more than four years until it was finished. One of the biggest challenges was to push the film forward without having the necessary funding to do so.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

MV: During the first year, the film was financed out with my personal savings. The story I wanted to tell was already happening, and if I wanted to make a film about it, I could not wait to get funding, so I got a camera and started filming by myself two or three times a week for about a year.

After that, I received a fund from the Ministry of Economy of El Salvador that allowed me to expand the work team and to finance the final part of the shooting and part of the postproduction. When we already had a rough cut, we won the MICGénero Postproduction GenderLab first prize, and thanks to that we were able to finish the postproduction.

However, we still have debts and we continue looking for funds that allow us to distribute the film, but now fortunately I have a partner producer who is working hard to get them.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

MV: The need to tell stories that I think are important and urgent to expose. I believe that cinema is a very powerful tool to show what is happening around us and to create debate about issues that affect us as a society.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

MV: One of the best pieces of advice: Follow your passion, avoid regrets!

The worst: Don’t quit your stable job and reliable salary working in advertising in order to make a film without procuring the necessary financing first—you are going to fail. Not following that advice has been the best decision I have ever made.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

MV: If you have a story that you really need to tell, and in which you would be willing to invest several years of your life, then give your best to tell it in the best way possible. Even if it’s with a simple camera or even a cell phone. Throw yourself into the pool.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

MV: “Capernaum” by Nadine Labaki. I watched it a week ago, and it’s still resonating in my head. I think it exposes issues that are very important to talk about, and she does it from the knowledge and understanding of the reality she is exposing and sharing. I also find the combination of fiction and documentary that she uses to tell the story fascinating.

W&H: It’s been a little over a year since the reckoning in Hollywood and the global film industry began. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?

MV: When I was filming “Cachada” in 2015, before these movements were launched, there was a scene that marked me a lot. At the end of one of the theater rehearsals, four of the protagonists of my film had a conversation about sexual abuse and recognized, one after another, that all of them had suffered frightening sexual abuse since their early childhood. At that moment I was very shocked — they told it with a total naturalness, as if that were normal and all women had to go through it sometime in life.

After that, I decided that this scene had to be part of the film because it was necessary to bring these issues to light. At that time, four years ago, it was not common to talk about sexual abuse, much less in a country with a macho culture as deeply rooted as El Salvador, and the women who did it were in intimate spaces, not publicly.

These movements globalized the idea that it is very important to denounce abuses to prevent them from happening and created a collective awareness of how entrenched this practice is in all spheres—from the most influential actresses in the film industry, to humble street vendors of El Salvador as the protagonists of my film.