Mothers and Daughters: A Conversation with Mariana Saffon

Everything I do is personal. A lot of the questions I raise in the film are questions I’ve asked myself about my relationship to my mother. When I turned thirty, I had the shocking realization that when my mother turned thirty she was divorced and I was already two years old. I suddenly understood what it must’ve felt like for her as a woman of that age, full of certain needs and desires, to be saddled with such responsibilities. I wanted to go back to that period of her life and reevaluate what she was going through without judgment, while also questioning the contradictions of motherhood—the fact that society expects mothers to be perfect all the time and the judgment they face when they don’t conform to those expectations. It hurt me as an only child to see my mother living her life without paying attention to me sometimes, so I sought to look beyond that hurt and see her for who she truly was. The film was shot in a rural town two hours away from Medellín where I used to spend vacations as a child. I used to dread going, but so much of what has come to define me took place there.

The films that have influenced me the most are cumulative rather than plot-driven, like those by Maurice Pialat or Michelangelo Antonioni. These films don’t follow a classical narrative structure. Rather, they are like an assembly of curated moments ripped out of life that might not seem to directly relate to one another but that come together to achieve a kind of truth. I wanted to insert something as seemingly monumental as death while treating it like any other event as a way of foregrounding the fact that this tragedy is just one of many occurrences in Milagros’s life. At the same time, it’s a moment of realization for her, of seeing something she doesn’t understand and being forced to look at the world a little differently because of it.

Colombian society is extremely stratified. I was specifically interested in the relationship between Milagros and the “help,” because often those kinds of connections can be deeper than the relationship many wealthy children have with their actual parents. Class hierarchies are extremely apparent yet normalized so that people are more able to live with themselves. I wanted these class differences to unfold naturally and contextualize Milagros’s privileged existence.