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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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.

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

About the Director

Natalia Cabral (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) and Oriol Estrada (Capellades, Catalonia, Spain) are award-winning filmmakers whose work live on the borderlines of fiction and nonfiction. Graduates of the prestigious EICT V Cuban Film School, Natalia and Oriol founded Faula Films in 2012 in order to provide a creative platform for the development and co-production of independent filmmaking in the Caribbean.

Their debut documentary feature film You and Me (2014) premiered at Visions du Réel and won several awards at Cartagena IFF, Trinidad & Tobago IFF, Havana IFF, Márgenes, Austin and Santo Domingo, among others. Their second documentary film Site of Sites (2016), supported by DOCTV Latinoamérica, premiered at IDFA – International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The film was presented in the US at the Neighboring Scenes Showcase of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, was official selection at Biarritz, Cartagena and Lima, and 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, co-produced by the Catalan arthouse production company Mallerich Films Paco Poch, with support of Fonprocine, the Ibermedia programme and the Latin America Fund of the Tribeca Film Institute.

The film premiered in the official competition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where it obtained a special mention from the jury. Later, it was awarded with the Golden Colon for Best Film at the Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival, the ALMA Award for Best Spanish Film Script at the Gijón International Film Festival, Best Director at the Punta del Este Festival, the SFCC Award from the French Critics at Cinélatino Toulouse, among others.

Miriam Miente is considered among the most notable films of Latin American cinema and is particularly outstanding within the showcase of Dominican Republic cinema, winning in 2020 the award for Best Film at the ADOCINE Awards of the Dominican film industry and the ADOPRESCI critics awards.

A Film About Couples (2021) is their latest work. The film was 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, and a special mention from the jury at the Biarritz Latin American Film Festival. It also won three awards at the Gijón International Film Festival, including Best Spanish Film and Best Director.

Notes on 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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