Abuelas: Grandmothers on a Mission

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Abuelas: Grandmothers on a Mission

A film by Noemi Weis

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SYNOPSIS

In 1985, the Academy Award® nominated film LAS MADRES: THE MOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO profiled the Argentinian mothers’ movement to demand to know the fate of 30,000 “disappeared” sons and daughters. Now three decades later, Argentina’s courageous Grandmothers, or “Abuelas”, have been searching for their grandchildren: the children of their sons and daughters who disappeared during Argentina’s “dirty war.” The women in ABUELAS are seeking answers about their children that nobody else will give — answers about a generation that survived, but were kidnapped and relocated to families linked with the regime that murdered their parents.

Argentine filmmaker Noemi Weis beautifully documents the grandmothers’ painstaking work and its results - dramatic, inspiring and sometimes controversial - as the women make contact with grandchildren who have grown up living lies created by their adoptive parents. Their tireless work continues today: the justice they are seeking for their children’s murder, their drive to find their grandchildren, and their international status speaking out for family reunification.

PRESS

'Noemi Weis’ films deal with really raw, emotional and powerful subjects. She gives a voice to the voiceless."

Catherine Hubbard The Argentinean Independent

The 'Abuelas' are an impressive group. Weis' film is a tribute and reminds people of a chapter of Argentine history most want to forget but can’t until those who have disappeared have been brought home.”

Latina Lista

"An impressive testimony of dictatorships’ impact on families and on the strength of women's hope through decades."

Sandrine Crisostomo FEMCINE

"The portrait… of older female activists… serv[es] as useful pedagogical tool within a number of disciplines including women’s studies, social gerontology, sociology, developmental psychology, and cultural studies."

Films for the Feminist Classroom

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

Winner, Jury Award, International Film Festival of Cine Politico, Buenos Aires
Best Documentary, Art and Politics at the Yorkton Film Festival, Canada

Female Eye Film Festival
International Politico Film Festival, Buenos Aires
Femcine Film Festival, Chile

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Noemi Weis

Noemi Weis is an award winning Writer, Director and Producer that has spent over 20-years telling stories on the big and small screens, from her worldwide advertising projects to her award winning documentaries. As a humanitarian and an advocate leader Noemi journeys where stories take her to bring voice to the world's most vulnerable. Her films have been sold in more than 60 countries, receiving numerous awards but most important, making in a difference in communities around the world. Recently she received a passionate message of support from Mm. Sophie Gregoire Trudeau for her latest film MILK and has been honoured with an invitation to meet Pope Francis at the Vatican in recognition of the impact her films have created in communities around the world.

Noemi is a proud member of the Unesco, Team Canada's Trade Missions and a Business Ambassador of Ontario, promoting the merits of Canadian production abroad. In this capacity, she participates in trade missions and has been honoured with the nomination of Woman Entrepreneur of the Year for three years in a row, the last one by Export Development Canada and nominated as a finalist for Woman Entrepreneur of the World, as the sole Canadian nominee. Additionally, Noemi has recently been recognized as one of the top 10 most influential Hispanic-Canadians, award given by Toronto Mayor John Tory. Noemi continues to create, direct and produce social justice films. For more information, please visit: www.filmblanc.com. (07/19)

Subject Areas

Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza De Mayo

This Academy award-nominated documentary about the Argentinian mothers’ movement to demand to know the fate of 30,000 “disappeared” sons and daughters remains as extraordinarily powerful as when it was first released. As well as giving an understanding of Argentinian history in the ‘70s and ‘80s, LAS MADRES shows the empowerment of women in a society where women are expected to be silent. LAS MADRES provides a banner of hope in the international struggle for human rights.

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Portraits of a Search

More than 20,000 people disappeared in Mexico during the horrifically violent war on drugs waged by former President Calderon. With each missing person, a family is left behind in a desperate search to get answers from a government that is suspiciously ambivalent. Putting a human face on the most harrowing of statistics, director Alicia Calderon courageously captures the stories of three mothers - Natividad, Guadalupe, and Margarita - as they search for their children who have gone missing. One mother constantly retraces the last steps of her son, combing empty fields for his body; another travels all the way to Washington, DC, to plead for US intervention; and the last simply tries to forget the emptiness and raise her now-motherless grandson. In one of the most powerful documentaries about the human casualties of the Mexican narco-wars, these women’s stories are among the many that stand for truth and justice for the 26,000 missing people in Mexico today. With their lives now completely devoted to seeking out the truth, they pursue any avenue possible, in the face of an indifferent government which considers their loved ones to be "collateral casualties" of the drug war.

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Absences (Ausencias)

ABSENCES, by award winning filmmaker Tatiana Huezo (The Tiniest Place), exposes the ever-intensifying phenomenon of enforced disappearance in Mexico. A boy and his father disappear one morning, snatched off the road by armed men. Left behind, alone with her daughter, Lulu, a victim who refuses to give in, decides to tell the unacceptable story: the unfillable void, the absence of loved ones, the unanswered questions and the suffocating silence. After 5 years, absence has her living in a limbo that gives way to desire, hope and the struggle to find her 9-year old son Brandon and her husband, alive. This hauntingly beautiful short film illuminates the way disappearance affects women, and broadens our awareness on disappearance and its social consequences in Mexico and Central America.

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The Room of Bones (El Cuarto de los Huesos)

THE ROOM OF BONES follows the passage of four mothers in the Institute for Legal Medicine as they search for their children’s remains in the midst of three decades of social violence in El Salvador. Across Mexico and Central America, the last twenty years have been plagued by a meteoric and troubling rise in desaparecidos, or missing persons. Mass murder has become all too common, and the identity of the perpetrators remains unknown as the relationship between governments, gangs, and other criminal organizations is shrouded in mystery. As civil and legal systems have failed to thoroughly investigate the crisis, families of victims are left to seek closure and justice on their own. Salvadoran filmmaker Marcela Zamora profiles a group of forensic anthropologists in her home country tasked with the noble but gruesome work of unearthing human remains and matching them with names of desaparecidos. The result is a harrowing portrait of a region in crisis.

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