Displaying items by tag: Patricial Ortega

MAMACRUZ

Spain/Venezuela, 2023, 84 minutes, Colour.

Kiti Manver, Silvia Acosta, Chema del Barco.

Directed by Patricia Ortega.

Many themes in this brief film originated in Venezuela by writer and director, Patricia Ortega, but financed in Spain.

This is a film predominantly about women. Women’s issues – with quite direct and explicit sequences.

Veteran actress, Kiti Manver, plays the grandmother, Mamacruz, brought up in old-fashioned Spain, in a very traditional style of the Catholic Church and in spirituality and piety. She is a seamstress. She mends the veils and cloths that adorn the statues for the church, the parish priest always seeking her out for this work. (And, illustrating the style of Catholicism, the parish priest appears, friendly, businesslike, seen at mass celebrations and communion, also with scenes of the mainly women’s congregation listening to scripture readings, especially a quite erotic passage from The Song of Songs.)

Mamacruz lives a very conventional live with her rather sluggish husband, rather immune to any sexual attraction or activity, caring for her granddaughter, a precocious girl at school, her daughter, the girl’s mother, pursuing a successful dancing career in Vienna, communication by zoom.

With mamacruz learning about the Internet, she searches out some pornography, beyond the telenovellas that she and her husband watch at home. She is curious, partly shocked. Then her women friends at church complain about a friend becoming involved with a sex therapy group in the town. Mamacruz goes to the group, is welcomed, is fascinated by the very explicit discussions about female sexuality, physical, psychological, emotional… And starts to change, getting her hair styled, getting out former dresses, trying to provoke her husband, to little effect.

This experience changes her, makes her more aware of her daughter’s ambitions and that she herself had suppressed all her hopes in the past, the reconciliation with her daughter. However, with a strict Catholic party, she goes to mass but leaves before communion, seeks out a priest at another parish to make her confession, telling him about the pornography and the sex therapy group.

However, she has made a number of friends, all jovial together, making dresses for them especially as their forms change over the years, the special friend with serious illness in hospital.

The audience will be very interested in seeing how mamcruz had changed and was coping a year after the film ends.