Manuela
(Manuela)
Clara Cullen / Argentina, Mexico / 2022 / 71 min





Santa Barbara Int'l Film Festival
Nueva Vision Award-LatAm FilmLALIFF Los Angeles Latino Int'l Film Festival
Cine Las Americas Int'l Film Festival
Best Narrative, Jury AwardUruguay International Film Festival
Mar del Plata International Film Festival
¡Cine Magnífico! LatAm Film Festival
Milwaukee Film Festival
Festival do Rio
Violet Crown Cinema Austin
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Spanish and English with English subtitles
With Barbara Lombardo, Alma Farago, Sophie Buhai
The complexities of migration, motherhood, and socioeconomic disparity are explored through the story of Manuela, a Latin American immigrant navigating the alienating urban landscape of Los Angeles. As she searches for employment, she secures a job as a nanny for Alma, the daughter of a distant and perpetually absent businesswoman, Ellen.
The film uses the growing intimacy between Manuela and Alma to interrogate themes of displacement, both physical and emotional. The poolside setting and domestic labor draw attention to the intersections of race, class, and gender, while Manuela’s increasing assumption of maternal duties, symbolized by her wearing Ellen’s clothes, blurs the boundaries between servant and mother figure.
Ellen’s prolonged absence complicates this dynamic further, raising questions about the commodification of care in affluent households and the emotional labor expected of immigrant women.
Press
“'Manuela' deals with the built-in alienation and foibles of an L.A. nanny’s life as she builds a strong bond with her young charge, meanwhile missing her own child — an occupational hazard. It’s a filmic film, with a naturalistic shooting style and a sense of improvisation, not purely for art’s sake, but for the sake of making the surrogate mother/child relationship feel all the more real.” – Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara Independent
“'Manuela', a Latin film that shows the various maternal relationships.” – Leila Medina, CNN
About the Director
Born in Argentina, Clara Cullen is a writer and director working in films, theater, and opera. She studied film at Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires and Documentary at Parson’s University in NYC. She began her career in film working with Spike Lee and under the mentorship of Werner Herzog.
She is a regular contributor to Nowness and The New York Times. Her advertising clients include Chanel, Hermes, Chloé, Stella McCartney, Airbnb, and Levis.
With the support of Nowness, she directed a series of short films: Beauty is a Form of Genius, Airtight, Above and Below, and Max. Inspired by the dark web, she directed her debut opera Hercules in Mato Grosso in 2015, staged at the Dixon Place Theater. The Prada Foundation selected her for their film residency Belligerent Eyes in 2016 to work on new ways of making cinema. In 2019 she showed her second Opera Should I Lose You at The Shed in NYC.
Clara presented her short documentary Lost and Found in Visions de Réel, Indie Lisboa, and SEMINCI in 2021. Her first feature Manuela was released in 2022.
Notes on Film
“Manuela is a film I made while Argentina was debating the legalization of abortion. After a collective fight for years, the main parties in Congress were forced to make it legal. The debate in Congress was followed by a multitude of people in the streets, and the whole process changed the conversation around motherhood, presenting it as a choice. As an artist, I felt the need to revisit the way I was brought up and the way I mothered my daughter.
Manuela was my nanny. She used to pick me up from school, cook my meals, get me dressed, and give me baths. Manuela couldn’t have children, so I became like a daughter to her. My parents weren’t around, so she became like a mother to me. I used to call her ‘Meme’ and my mom ‘Mama’, but that was too upsetting for my mother, so she fired Manuela. I never saw her again. But she has called to wish me happy birthday ever since.
Many years passed, and I had a kid of my own: Alma. The first few months were challenging. Motherhood wasn’t for me. I wanted my freedom back. I wanted to go back to work. I hired Rebecca to take care of Alma. When Rebecca walked into my house for her interview, I saw Manuela again: the same beautiful long hair, the same dark brown eyes… Manuela’s kind loving eyes.
Alma and Rebecca bonded immediately, and I started working again. I felt alive and free. Two months later, I got really sick. I had to go to the Emergency Room, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. I was as yellow as Bart Simpson. My husband thought I was going to die.
While I was convalescing in bed, I had this image that if something were to happen to me, Rebecca would always take care of Alma. That’s the first image I had for this movie: Manuela taking Alma to Mexico.
I thought of Barbara Lombardo to play Manuela because she is a good friend of mine and I admire her work as an actress. Alma, my daughter, would be herself, or me—who knows anymore!
We created a small group of collaborators: my producer, Helena Martel; our DOP, Gillan Garcia; and our sound recordist, Matthew Leep. I didn’t want a big production. First, because we didn’t have any money, and second so we could shoot Alma’s world in a very intimate way. We shot the movie in fifteen days. The first week was just Barbara, Alma, and me. That allowed them to adjust to each other and to have a camera around.
The style of the movie is very fresh; it’s fiction but feels like a documentary. My idea was to generate a space where the actors didn’t need direction: they would just be in character, and we would shoot them. I worked with a script that we adapted scene by scene to make it feel as natural as possible.
The result is a very honest movie about motherhood. A woman who is missing her baby adopts the child that she is hired to take care of, and a child who misses her mom adopts this stranger as her mother.
To end this letter of intention I want to share a story that has haunted me. I was visiting my dad in the countryside in Argentina when I saw a calf wearing some sort of fur coat. I asked my dad what that was about, and he answered: ‘That is an orphan calf wearing the skin of a calf that died this morning. I’m hoping the mother will recognize the smell of her dead calf and start feeding the orphan.’ That cow and that calf lived a life together as mother and son. I was mesmerized. An intriguing image, a sad tale of loss, and a reminder of the overriding power of love.”
– Clara Cullen, Director