The four protagonists provide their testimonies about the reasons for abandoning their families and the situation they encounter upon arrival, in this short documentary
Some women leave their countries to arrive in Spain, alone and for different reasons. A portrait of these silent people, who leave little trace, can be found in the film ‘Las Nadie’, made by Elisa Martín Gómez, in the direction, and Irene García-Martínez, in charge of Photography. “We wanted to tell stories that were never going to be told,” says Martín Gómez, in a presentation this weekend at the EFTI cinema forum in Madrid. “We did it with a very small team, very feminine, so that they would feel comfortable telling their lives.”
Recorded in the houses of the protagonists in the midst of a pandemic, the voices of Danielle resound, who arrived from Cameroon; Ofelia, from Venezuela; Fatima, from Morocco and Solange, from Nicaragua. “In front of the camera we open our hearts,” says Solange, a 26-year-old refugee, with five years in Spain. «There are many stories that are untold and that we must give them from the cinema, the songs, the painting, a place to raise our voices. Making ourselves visible is very important ».
The authors state that when choosing these four testimonies, they received criticism about the lack of “sufficient drama.” “I thought: what kind of morbidity are you looking for”, recalls García-Martínez “We wanted, more than the terrible thing, to show the reality of many women in Spain, where the extraction of women is under absolute silence.”
For example, Fatima suffered a situation of labor exploitation as a domestic worker, with long hours without hours. “Not seeing a person as equals and not treating them in the same way is a type of violence that is so assumed”, maintains Martín Gómez. “It is important that the people who experience these things are the ones who tell it, and we always listen to them with respect.”
In front of the camera, the four women agreed to talk about their mothers, touching on the subject of nostalgia and what they left behind: their families. “Fiction abuses drama and can fall into paternalism on issues such as immigration”, García-Martínez defends the documentary genre.
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