NORITA

Documentaries are born from curiosity and a deep desire to understand one’s own lived experiences. NORITA is a project that encompasses an important part of our personal journeys as individuals and filmmaker. I (Andrea) was born in 1979 at the peak of Argentina’s dictatorship. My adolescence was characterized by the return of democracy, and I became who I am alongside the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, on the streets with them in Buenos Aires, and later in life working in communications at their organization. I (Jayson) stepped out into the world as a young gay man from a rural working-class town in Australia and immigrated to Argentina. It was during one of the happiest and freest moments of my life, 8 years ago in Buenos Aires, when I met Nora “Norita” Cortiñas. I was working as a newspaper journalist and she was one of Argentina’s most vocal human rights campaigners — and still is! Nora and I found each other at queer rights events, where my attendance oscillated between reporting and being among the community. Nora and I bonded and soon I was filming her whole world, which encompassed the period from 2015 when she became a symbol of the mass women’s rights movement’s campaign to legalize abortion.

Our presence (and that of our camera) in Nora’s life became largely unnoticeable to her. This allowed for a particular type of intimacy in our approach in which we were able to tap into the natural tension that exists between her street activism and her home life. It forms the basis of the film’s rich drama — a highly dynamic woman who has politicized the pain of her son’s disappearance 40 years ago by turning it into a clarion call to defend human rights and democracy collectively. Nora’s unwavering commitment to multiple causes on today’s streets belies a loving tribute to her missing son. We come to understand her last and only connection to Gustavo is on the streets. Her activism, as an expression of love and joy, becomes a potent political antidote to hateful systems of oppression and political violence which are rearing their heads.

This journey has come at a huge personal cost for Nora, and inevitably much of her personal drama will remain unresolved — her son’s disappearance and the breakdown of her relationship with her surviving family. She emerges as a conflicted and imperfect character — not just an icon but a woman, mother, wife and sister. Nora’s inability to fully reconcile her two worlds highlights her humanity, and allows us to see the cracks in her life through which politics seeps through. She has lost a great deal of her agency as she becomes eulogized as a heroic figure, especially in older age; and over the course of our interviews together she seeks to take back much of her own narrative.

Nora and the film leave us with an ironically exhilarating sense of hope. Her example is a powerful message at a time of major uncertainty and fear. She reminds us that human beings are unstoppable when we check our egocentricity at the door to work together for the collective good. In other words, I am because we are. This is particularly important for disenfranchised groups like women, queer communities, people of color, and the poor and working-class who suffer the brunt of our world’s crises. Ours are the communities that Nora is seen advocating for in the vignettes of her activism spread throughout the film. Personally we see Nora’s support of abortion reform through a broad, integral perspective — that if you have a commitment to human rights, democracy and justice, then women must be given choice and control over their own bodies.