Educational Media Reviews Online

This richly absorbing and fluently probing documentary profiles the lives of two female bullfighters in contemporary Spain. Making good on the directors’ claim that “bullfighting is the quintessential symbol of masculinity and bravery in Spanish culture,” Ella Es El Matador vividly presents the daunting multiplicity of challenges these women face both inside and outside the bullring, from a bloody goring in the thigh and chauvinistic mockery from audiences to discrimination by promoters who tend to book them in low-status arenas.

In her intractable youthful zeal for bullfighting, Eva Florencia, the younger of the two women, ran away from her home in Italy as a teenager to eventually become an apprentice in Spain. The film follows her as she struggles to achieve full matador status by successfully performing in the required twenty-five sanctioned bullfights. The other woman, Mari Paz Vega, having already achieved matador status, is one of world's premier female bullfighters; yet, as the film amply shows, even she still encounters sexist resistance from within the bullfighting industry and the Spanish public.

A compact but illuminating survey of the history of bullfighting reveals that women have long been participating and claiming their right to do so during several periods in Spain's history when bans were in place. And while moral issues surrounding the practice are not directly addressed at any length, the film-makers have nevertheless found a judicious way of making concerns about animal welfare a persistent presence in viewers’ minds by offsetting the several earnest espousals of quasi-mystical reverence for the bull made throughout the film with unsparing footage of the bloody reality within the bullring.