Alma and Esperanza (Itandehui Jansen, 2012) was the second short film in which I participated as co-writer and producer. The idea for this story came to the director, Itandehui Jansen, when we went to the community of Santa María Apazco along with her children to visit my parents. The contrast between the affection displays from the children, who had grown up in the Netherlands, and from my parents, who had always lived in their community, inspired this story.
The short film presents a family relationship between two characters who do not understand each other because of the language barrier caused by a context of migration. It tells the story of a girl who grew up in the United States who travels back to her native community after the passing of her mother in order to live with her grandmother. While the girl does not speak Spanish, the grandmother only speaks Mixtec. The role of the grandmother is played by my mother, Esperanza García López, and the role of the girl is played by Dzaui Jansen, the director’s daughter.
Just like their characters, the women who portray them do not share a common language. My mother only speaks Mixtec while Dzaui back then did not speak Spanish.
The film was shot in a familiar context. Itandehui directed the actors and oversaw photography, while I organized the production and recorded the sound. Such an intimate and small production didn’t require a script, especially because my mother and Dzaui were not used to reading scripts and had no common language. The encounter and communication between the girl and her grandmother was rendered through quotidian scenes based on improvisation. The filming was therefore guided by a general idea. Itandehui explained the content of the scenes to Dzaui in Dutch while I did the same for my mother in Mixtec. For the scene where the grandmother receives the call informing her about her daughter’s death, I reminded my mother about the anxiety she felt during the time after the 1985 earthquake when she had no news about her daughters who had migrated to the United States.
To edit the short film Itandehui remotely collaborated with filmmaker Esteban Arrangoiz. In order for him to learn about the story and manage the post-production funds, we wrote a script based on what we had already shot. The score was composed again by Gerry Celada and we decided to write a song in Mixtec for the credits. Gerry had a melody in mind that sounded like a lullaby and I wrote a song in Mixtec following this concept.
The making of the short film began with a co-creation process through oral communication in different languages (Mixtec, Spanish and Dutch). The story and the characters were developed based on the actors’ improvisation. During this process Itandehui and I communicated with each other in Spanish, I communicated with my mother in Mixtec, and Itandehui communicated with her daughter in Dutch. The story that came up during the process was later rendered into a screenplay once everything had been shot. It is no longer possible to distinguish an “original” language from a translation but they rather constitute a process of multilingual fluidity at every moment.