IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL
A Portrait of Ana María Simo
A film in progress about the power of a writer to invent another world.
Born in Cuba, Ana María Simo came of age in the turbulent years of the Revolution, becoming one of the most daring young writers of her generation. As a teenager, she was co-director of Ediciones El Puente, the legendary literary collective that gave voice to young poets and writers. Their experiment was short-lived. Many of the group were persecuted, even imprisoned, or forced into labor camps or exile.
For Ana, exile was not an ending, but a series of beginnings.
In Paris, amid the upheavals of May ’68 and the radical movements that followed, she participated in the FHAR, the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire, the MLF, Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, and helped create the lesbian group les Gouines Rouges. In New York, she co-founded Medusa’s Revenge, an experimental lesbian theater and community center; the Lesbian Avengers, whose irreverent street actions would reverberate far beyond the city; Dyke TV and The Gully online magazine.
Everywhere she went, Ana made things.
She wrote. She performed. She organized. She provoked. She gathered people around tables and in theaters, apartments, bars, libraries and street corners. She made temporary worlds for people who had not yet found a place in the existing ones.
Her life moves through the underground histories of Cuba, France and the United States—histories that are often absent from official accounts, yet remain alive in photographs, fragments of film, handwritten pages, memories, arguments, jokes and the voices of those who were there.
This film follows those traces.
Created by journalist Kelly Cogswell and documentary filmmaker Harriet Hirshorn, IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL is not a conventional biography, but an encounter with a life that resists definition. The past returns in fragments: an image, a sentence, a face, a remembered gesture. The people who knew her become witnesses, but also characters in a collective memory of radical possibility.
And at the center of it all is Ana herself: the writer, the exile, the lover, the troublemaker, the political actor, the friend. A woman who crossed oceans and movements without ever quite leaving the place she began: the territory of the imagination.
Funny, fierce, contradictory, brilliant and deeply human, Ana María Simo emerges not simply as a witness to history—but as one of the people who helped make it.