Carta a mi madre para mi hijo

Synopsis

Carla is pregnant and naked, just like the photos of her mother when she was pregnant with Carla. Sunlight slips through the windows as we catch bursts on Super 8 of aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents smiling, sewing and reciting poetry. We watch a young girl grow up through the decades from the 196os onwards, intertwined with threads of femininity and history, until we see her pregnant against the blue sky of the Catalan coast.
Out of family, diaries and fiction—a familiar combination in Carla Simón’s films—she fashions a firsthand account of maternity and much more besides. Filmmaking as an endeavour to reimagine missing family memories.

Bio/Filmo

Carla Simón (Barcelona, 1986) studied at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of California. She was awarded a scholarship to study an MA at the London Film School. Her debut feature, Estiu 1993 (2017), premiered at the Berlinale, where it won the Best First Film Award and the Grand Prix Generation Kplus. Her shorts include Correspondencia (2020), made together with Dominga Sotomayor and screened at Visions du Réel, New York Film Festival, San Sebastián Film Festival and l’Alternativa. Her second feature, Alcarràs, won the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlinale and is Spain’s contender for the 2023 Oscar race for Best International Feature. She was one of our Satellites at last year’s festival.
Carla Simón’s Carta a mi madre para mi hijo is being screened together with Lucrecia Martel’s latest short, Camarera de piso, by way of an epilogue to the recent conversation between the two filmmakers at this year’s Biennial of Thought in Barcelona.