Aitana & Ozogoche

Both documentaries were screened last Thursday in Casa de Colón.

Aitana (2023)

a film by Marina Alberti

Marina Alberti’s directorial debut is a letter of love to her mother, Aitana Alberti León, and grandmother, María Teresa León. Now Aitana starts to show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, which also affected María Teresa.

Now this was not in the film: according to Spanish Wikipedia, María Teresa León spent her last years of life in a sanatorium in Majadahonda, near Madrid. Her loving husband, Rafael Alberti, never accepted María Teresa’s illness and... escaped to Rome. What a gentlemen! She died alone and forgotten.

Ozogoche (2023)

a film by Joe Houlberg Silva

In a recent interview, the director Joe Houlberg says that it took six years to film Ozogoche. In the beginning it was supposed to be a documentary about strange behaviour of migratory birds, upland sandpipers (Bartramia longicauda), known in Ecuador as cuvivíes. There is no shortage of hypotheses why some of these birds travel some 10,000 kilometers from North America to Ozogoche lagoons only to plummet into the icy waters and die. What happened though, after these years of living with local community, the film creators realised that poor cuvivíes became, in words of Houlberg, “just an allegory of the true story <...>, the story of an indigenous family in the Ecuadorian páramo who are waiting for their relatives, waiting for something to change”. If you liked the magical realism of El Eco, you’ll fall in love with Ozogoche.