A Conversation on the Feminist Application of Maestra: The Film Marie Lerma (bio) and Kristen Kolenz (bio) Maestra: The Film is the directorial debut of Catherine Murphy. This 2012 documentary interviews a group of nine women whose lives dramatically changed after working in the Cuban literacy campaign of 1961. The nine women reflect on how the spirit of post-revolution Cuba encouraged them to go out and teach the urban and agricultural poor. Despite their families’ objections, the young women left the cities to live in their students’ rural homes and learn about another kind of life amid real threats of physical danger from insurgents. As we learn at the end of the film, the teachers’ hard work achieved significant results when, in 1962, the United Nations deemed illiteracy eradicated in Cuba. In addition to the impact on the Cuban people, the film focuses on the enduring changes in the women’s lives. The documentary effectively delivers a series of personal narratives that add these women to the historical archive, by mixing archival materials of the literacy campaigns, personal photos from the women, and video footage of the interviews. In what follows, the authors of this review engage in a conversation about the film’s content and gender politics. They comment on the documentary’s reliance on women’s oral testimonies and on their commitment to literacy and more inclusive pedagogies. In the process, they also address how the rhetorical devices of the film interact with traditional notions of nation-building and citizenship in post-revolutionary Cuba. kristen: In listening to the stories of the women, we learn about their pedagogy, which clearly draws from the same principles of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The women tell us how the success of their evening literacy classes was dependent on earning the respect of their students by collaborating with them in their work during the day. We hear how essential community building became and how the teachers were first the students. Before the women were able to teach, they had to learn to live in their new environments, [End Page 168] and their students took on the role of teachers. Clearly, the women were dedicated to meeting their students in the places where they lived while also committing themselves to a pedagogical style that required them to move back and forth between the roles of teacher and student within the communities where they worked. The film is quite effective in bringing these ideas to the forefront and showing how important this dialectical approach was in the development of the teachers. The narrative makes a case for the benefits of a pedagogy of the oppressed both by documenting the success of students through the quick and enduring eradication of illiteracy and the ways the women’s lives were permanently changed. The women’s interviews make clear that this pedagogical style led to measurable success for the students in the national eradication of illiteracy and also to their own liberation; unfortunately the film only infers that students also experienced some kind of liberation without providing any kind of solid evidence. As a feminist committed to pedagogies that liberate, the film leaves me wondering if Freire’s principles applied in the literacy campaign did in fact lead to the liberation of the students as well. marie: Having studied the history of Latin American social movements, I find this film is useful in adding another narrative of the post-revolution period of Cuba. However, without knowledge of Cuban history in the twentieth century, it would be difficult to frame the film in a way that would interrogate the structure successfully. This film would work best in a classroom that already deals with Latin America, whether the focus is on revolutions and social movements, policy, or women in the twentieth century. In a general or introductory class on women’s studies the necessary background of the Cuban Revolution might not be covered in sufficient depth to give students the proper historical context. The bulk of the film is told through the voices of the nine women being interviewed. However, there are short sections in which an English speaking narrator intervenes to add political context...