Resisting Witch Hunt

Female Corporeality, the Seductive Power of Narrative, and Ancestrality in Coven of Sisters (2020)

Abstract

The spectre of the witch still inspires academic and artistic interest. The witch hunt during modernity represents an oppressive period that still fascinates and challenges the human capacity of explanation. Indeed, there have been several films and TV series about witches in the last decades. This article analyses the movie Coven of Sisters (2020), an Argentine-Spanish-Basque coproduction that tells the story of resistance of six Basque young women in 1609 accused of witchcraft by the Spanish inquisition. The movie is analysed in terms of female corporeality, especially in regard to the potential for resistance that the young women discover in the process of telling stories about how they supposedly became witches and in their performance of a sabbath. The analysis was theoretically based on the perspectives of four feminist authors – Rachel Pollack (1997), Clarissa Pinkola Estés (2007), Gloria Anzaldua (2007), and Silvia Federici (2021).