Jorge I Perez
Miami (USA), March 8 (EFE). – “It can’t be classified, but it’s cinema.” This is how Cuban director Rolando Diaz defines his Miami Film Festival “Absence File,” which is based on the true story of a girl who is adopted by a wealthy family from the Dominican Republic and returns eleven years later. for poverty.
It is an unclassified film, some see it as fiction, others as a documentary, and still others, like its director, only as cinema.
In an interview with Efe, Diaz, who lives in Spain and has extensive experience in the documentary genre, explains that the only fictional character in the film is the Dominican journalist-actress and journalist Judith Rodriguez. “The rest are real characters,” he says.
The director explains that the idea for this 76-minute film, which will premiere in the United States this Tuesday, “The Lost Children of Jarabacoa” (The Lost Children of Jarabacoa) comes from the hand. Cuban Dominican poet and journalist Alfonso Quinones.
A true and heartbreaking story
“He suggested to me that I take to the movies a true story he had investigated about the adoption of a girl who was given to a wealthy family in Santo Domingo at the age of two and back to her very poor origins when she was 13 inches,” Diaz says.
“The reason for her going back to her biological parents was a mystery, but it was a harsh reality, because the girl had been educated as a rich girl and suddenly falling into poverty was a severe blow to her,” he adds.
The case of Moraima, who found out she was adopted when her adoptive parents separated, had a huge impact in the Dominican Republic.
Quinones discovered in his field research that in the mountainous region of Jarabacoa, in the 1990s, adoptions abounded. “Then he gave me several stories that finally appeared in the movie. The script was written by both of them,” he details.
According to Diaz, who is still working at 74 and hopes to screen his latest film, “An Elephant on a Spider’s Web” next May at the Docs Valencia Documentary Festival, a “sine qua non” set by making the absences file ( 2020) that the lead actress was a journalist.
“Quinnons understood me and was always by my side. I was very fortunate that Judith was, in addition to being a great actress, a journalist. This made things easier for me. I spoke to her in a language that she perfectly mastered, which made it easier for us to elaborate on the questions we might ask the real heroes” .
“I wanted her to act and think like a journalist. We’ve built a vague, lonely character, even cold at times, who takes the investigation personally and connects it to elements from her past, which gives her character a lot of credibility,” is Quiñones’ “alternative ego,” he adds.
The director, who jumped into fantasy with the comedy “The Birds Throwing a Shotgun” (1985), admits to “not rating” his film, although it’s not something that keeps him up at night.
“There are festivals that have told us that they only accept it as a feature film, some value it as a documentary and others only see it as a cinema. I agree with this last definition, after all, pure documentaries are also films,” adds the director from Spain, where he lives.
At the Miami Film Festival, “Absence Profile” is part of the so-called “Dominican Quintet,” a selection that highlights “powerful films” that have emerged from the Caribbean country, the festival’s executive director, Guy Laplante, told Eph.
In addition to Diaz’s film, the quintet includes the films “Perejil” by Jose Maria Cabral; “Candela” by Andres Farias Centron; “Carrageeta” by Silvina Schnacer and Ulysses Bora Guardiola and “Film about husbands” by Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada. EFE
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