Director Notes. The starting Point

Oliva came back from a trip to Cuba with the book, “Reyita, sencillamente” (“Simply Reyita”). It was the starting point for making a documentary which she proposed that I co-direct. I opened its pages and discovered the life of “an ordinary, normal woman”, perhaps too much so for it to interest me on a first reading. There was a gap of two generations between Reyita and me. How could I identify with a woman who represented the model from which we all want to flee, that of a mother with her silences and her sacrifices? After reading it several times, I could see the other side of the character: that of a woman who rebelled at a time when she was expected to submit to the wishes of others. She didn’t always win, but that too made the character more attractive.



With the book, we wrote a script which we then had to tear to bits after our first trip to look for locations. We were surprised to learn that Reyita’s children, now adults, knew barely anything about their mother’s life until the book was published, and that this had given rise to small discrepancies in which they didn’t agree with Reyita’s portrayal of her husband. We came back with a host of things that had been forgotten, contradictions, some memories that had been experienced and others that had been read. As a result, we ecided to build the documentary as a group story, and gather together a family’s oral memory in order to build a biography with those little cracks. In a family that had kept hardly any photos, the spoken word was the way of perpetuating their memories and anecdotes. Later on, we were able to rescue some filmed material in which Reyita appears and it is perhaps she, at the age of 95, who shines most brightly in the group, who sums up the essence of what we wanted to tell. Reyita made us look at our mothers and grandmothers with new eyes and we wanted, in some way, for her to help us know better those we have closest to us. Elena ortega. Co-director