Zoila’s home-movie aesthetic paints an intimate portrait of the titular Mapuche nanny whose absence from the frame poses important questions about the maternal relationship between her and the children she raised. Think Roma without the romanticization of the indigenous maid.
Throughout the film, the filmmaker tries to capture the essence of what unites her with her nanny, and also what separates them. Zoila’s figure was for too long like a nebula, and to begin to understand it involved dismantling class, race, and gender conflicts that coexist among them as ghosts.
The diversity of the footage also exposes a battle of narrators wanting to film their history, which questions rigid ideas of parenting and expresses the genesis of a family under reconstruction.
