You and me

(Tú y yo)

Natalia Cabral, Oriol Estrada / Costa Rica / 2015 / 87 min
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  • FICCI Int'l Film Festival of Cartagena de Indias

    Special Jury Prize

  • Visions du Réel - Nyon Int'l Film Festival

  • Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival

    Best Documentary Feature

  • Habana Int'l Film Festival

    Best Documentary

  • La Silla Awards

    Best Documentary

  • RDOC Int'l Film Festival

    Best Dominican Documentary
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Synopsis

Spanish with English subtitles

With Paula Lebrón, Francisca Perez de Sosa

The Mrs., a 70-year-old widow, and Aridia, her young maid, live in isolation in a house in Santo Domingo where they have domestic chores to keep them occupied. Their relationship is tense, but at the end of the day, they know they only have each other.

Bonds of friendship and the complex power dynamics embedded within them are revealed through the daily travails of the two women as they struggle to keep the house in order. The film’s static, one-take style allows conversations to unfold with candor and without interrupting the comic verbal polyrhythms of Caribbean bochinche.

Related Subjects
About the Director
Natalia Cabral (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) and Oriol Estrada (Capellades, Catalonia, Spain) are award-winning filmmakers. Their work lives on the borderlines of fiction and nonfiction. Natalia and Oriol graduated from the prestigious EICT V Cuban Film School. In 2012, they founded Faula Films to provide a creative platform for the development and co-production of independent filmmaking in the Caribbean.

Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada, Miriam Lies - A Film About Couples

Available for Q&As, Masterclasses, and workshops upon request, in English or Spanish.
Book a Screen+Talk

 

Their debut documentary film, You and Me (2014), premiered at Visions du Réel. It won several awards at Cartagena, Trinidad & Tobago, Havana, Márgenes, Austin, and Santo Domingo Film Festivals. Their second documentary film, Site of Sites (2016), received the support of DOCTV Latinoamérica. The film premiered at IDFA and screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It was an official selection at Biarritz, Cartagena, and Lima film festivals. The film was listed as one of the 25 best Latin American films of 2017 by Cinema Tropical.

Miriam Lies (2018) is the couple’s first fiction feature film. It was produced with the support of the Ibermedia program and the Tribeca Film Institute’s Latin America Fund. The film premiered in the official competition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. There, it obtained a special mention from the jury. Later, it was awarded the Golden Colon for Best Film at the Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival. Other awards include the ALMA Award for Best Spanish Film Script at the Gijón International Film Festival, Best Director at the Punta del Este Festival, and the SFCC Award from the French Critics at Cinélatino Toulouse.

Miriam Lies is considered among the most notable films of Latin American cinema. It is particularly outstanding within the showcase of Dominican Republic cinema. It won Best Film at the ADOCINE Awards and the ADOPRESCI Critics’ Award.

A Film About Couples (2021) screened at the Locarno, Rome, Miami, Hamburg, and Cartagena International Film Festivals. It won the best film award from the Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma. It also received a special mention from the jury at the Biarritz Latin American Film Festival. Other awards include the Best Spanish Film and Best Director at the Gijón International Film Festival.

Press

“Here at the dog-end of colonial slavery, it’s all about the routines, the filling-up of claustrophobic dead days with needless tasks, performed by two people thrown together for historical reasons they know nothing of, tied together by unmentioned economic arrangements. ” – Jonathan Holland, The Hollywood Reporter

“A claustrophobic chamber massacre piece that recalls a Fassbinderian exercise in domination and submission.” – Giona A. Nazzaro, Visions du Réel

“You & me's understated approach to the contradictory heart of a society renowned for its warmth and openness, but racked by deep divisions of class and race.” – Andrew S. Vargas, Remezcla Magazine

Notes on the Film

“We gathered camera and sound equipment, just the two of us, and spent 3 months in a house with two women who share a very special relationship. We had no script, we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but we were there, observing these two women and noticing they didn’t care for our presence at all.

They were intensely immersed in their own world so we had the opportunity to collect images and sounds in which we can perceive a certain kind of truth and beauty in the simplicity of everyday moments. After shooting, we spend months trying to build up a narrative at the editing room and now we have a film that was possible thanks to some savings and a mysterious understanding between four people trying to make a film in one house.”

– Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada, Directors

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