Director Notes. Recovering Women's Legacy

She died with a story on her lips. This phrase pursued me endlessly since I first became interested in invisible lives, those lived by women, the heroines of our everyday history. From I was very little, almost as if I were a deaf mute, I was obsessed with listening constantly to those stories I could read on the lips of my aunts and grandmothers. My life, as a child, was spent in the space occupied daily by those women, from the dining room to the bedroom, from the bowl to the kitchen. There, by the warmth of the cooker, we’d do our homework, play and live our lives. This scene was reproduced in each of the houses in the geography of my childhood, but especially in my grandmother’s house. There, next to that bubbling pot that smelled of mint, stories were cooked up.

So, two years ago now, in Havana, when I sat down for the first time with Sonnia Moro and Daisy Rubiera, or when we sat together with their friend the poetess Georgina Herrera, I felt at home again. I had been looking endlessly or a story in order to begin my adventure as a director and there I came up against the only possible one. A story that rarely goes beyond the privacy of the walls of houses, a story of women.

Reyita waited until the end of her days to tell about her life, and she chose her youngest daughter, Daisy, to finish it by telling a story. Georgina says that we have to talk less and always listen to those old women from long ago who watched over their dead at wakes and there, sitting beside death, talked about life.

Reyita is my heartfelt tribute to our grandmothers, aunts and mothers, to those wise women, so often invisible, who are the ones who really know and transmit just the right touch that History needs.