Maite Aberdi’s Films

Original Article in Spanish.

This year she was nominated for a Goya award with the documentary La once; in the recent version of Sanfic she was acclaimed for her short film Yo no soy de aquí and these days she is promoting her latest documentary Los niños, at the prestigious Idfa festival. Here, a journey through the cinema that has marked her life, where the police genre and the depth of Iranian cinema stand out.

Paula 1212. Saturday, November 19, 2016.

Eleven o’clock

| Maite Alberdi

This documentary consolidated her career. “It confirms to me that you have to defend your ideas, even if they are radical. It is a very experimental film: a single location, many years in one place, only close-ups, cuicas ladies talking while drinking eleven; however, it is a universal story that moves. The recognition gives us the strength to continue taking risks”.

The power of affection

| James L. Brooks

Her mother was the one who showed her the movies when she was a child; they would talk for hours about the films they watched together. “As a child I watched ‘big’ movies that my mom rented. She liked the ones with trials or political intrigue like JFK, All the President’s Men or In the Line of Fire. I think I saw all the ones in that genre. But if I have to choose one that marked my childhood it was The Strength of Affection, which is about the search for love, in its different forms and stages, of a mother and daughter. It was the first film I saw that had the emotion on the surface, where the sorrow is impregnated after watching it and it is hard to get it out. That emotion is what I hope to find as a spectator and to achieve as a filmmaker when I face a film”.

Frantic search

| Roman Polanski

Quentin Tarantino and Roman Polanski marked her adolescence. “After seeing Pulp Fiction nothing was ever the same again. And I think I speak for many. With Polanski’s Frantic Search, I saw it as a teenager and was impressed with the handling of suspense and tension. I watched it again a few years ago, in my late 30s, and found it slow and lacking in tension. Although I still like it, it was a different cinematic experience than I remembered. In a way it corroborated for me how the rhythms of language have changed over the years, especially for this type of genre, suspense.”

The Taste of Cherries

| Abbas Kiarostami

This film forged his interest and decision to study film. “I saw it for the first time at school. I was dazzled by the story of a man who decides to commit suicide but first needs to find someone to bury him. It is fascinating how it is told from a simple narrative and from observation. With her I learned about how personal culture determines the writing of a screenplay”.

I am not from here

| Maite Alberdi

She is interested in a theme and imagines an ideal character that she goes out to find. “It’s very difficult to find an incredible character, that can happen once in a lifetime. You have to go out and look for stories. In I’m not from here, I had studied a lot about Alzheimer’s and I knew that in the first phase of the disease people remember the first years of their life. So I thought ‘what if I look for an immigrant with Alzheimer’s who thinks he lives somewhere else?’ I went to many nursing homes and came across the protagonist, Josebe. She, without a doubt, has a character, a way of thinking and a story that I would never have thought of writing.”