Sisterhood on the threshold in Julia Solomonoff's Hermanas (2005)

Mirna Vohnsen examines Julia Solomonoff's debut feature, Hermanas (2005), to discuss the way the film's central characters chart their liminality, defined by Victor Turner as representing "the midpoint of transition in a status-sequence between two positions" (1974, 237). These two positions refer to social structures that are suspended during the liminality phase. Focusing on the protagonists' spatial isolation in a suburban Texas neighbourhood and the interweaving of past and present, Vohnsen contends that they experience their liminal position as tense and uneasy, but simultaneously as a state of regeneration. She explores both the spatial liminality in which the sisters come to terms with the past and the effect the liminality phase has on their lives, their sister bond and their personal identity.