The Queen

Manuel Abramovich was a 2019 fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, where he was working on the development of two new projects. In 2013 his portrait of a beauty queen, "La Reina", was a hit at festivals worldwide Eleven-year-old Memi from rural Argentina is a beauty queen. Trapped in her thoroughly structured everyday life and the adult world, the girl lives between the glamorous beauty pageant and the pressure of her family, who desperately want her to become carnival queen... "Manuel Abramovich likes to make himself invisible. The Argentinian documentary filmmaker specialises in observational situations in which he can be distant and intimately present at the same time: as if he were not even there, and yet in a very immediate way right in the middle of it. In 2013, he had a worldwide festival hit with his portrait of a beauty queen: 'La Reina' is a girl named María Emília, called Memi. She is being groomed for competitions such as the 'Queen of Chocolate'. The heavy crown she has to wear in the process causes Memi great pain, but her mother simply brushes the complaint aside: 'Take a pill.' In the girl's shining face, one can see a distinct cultural need for a counter-world, but also precisely a reflection of the tears shed for the outward impression at the parade." (From the portrait of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme)