Direction: Margarita Ledo Cast: Mónica Camaño, Mónica de Nut Country: Spain Year: 2021 Release date: 3-26-2021 Genre: Documentary Script: Margarita Ledo Photography: Alberte Branco Synopsis: Much has been said about the workers’ struggle, but The specificity of this struggle for women has rarely appeared in the cinema: the openness to the world that brought them to work, also in the midst of turbulent times for the manufacturing sector. Through the energetic and charismatic women of the A Pontesa ceramic factory (Galician sisters of the cigar makers of Cádiz and Seville), Margarita Ledo builds an exciting, combative and poetic story of an unfinished struggle: “a film that deals with what It takes a long time for women to have rights, not only to vote but also to access salaried work and the possibility of being independent. In short, how much it cost us to be a nation ”.
In her splendid previous work, A cicatriz branca (2013), the provocative Margarita Ledo, one of the most personal filmmakers of Galician cinema, came across the unsolvable: she wanted to make a documentary about female emigration to Argentina in the 20th century and only found the absence of images. This feminine erasure of her history leads her to this last reflection, which seeks to repair said absence. Nation is an express vindication of women’s memories: of groups, in the first place (the workers of a ceramic factory, Pontesa), and also individuals. She does it from the archive, to remember past and recent times of struggle. But also from the sisterhood of the relationship between women who shared (and continue) work and dreams. And also, of course, the forgotten memory of others who were silent, who gave up so much after suffering insults for being who they were. Hence the crucial sequence in which Mónica Camano remembers forgotten names, while her sickle, symbolically, clears the way. And despite the archive, Ledo does not marry ordinary realism, and constant formal questions make their way through her film that make him a fruitful path towards the future.
