QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM INDIELISBOA

Portuguese-born filmmaker Ana Pérez-Quiroga interview her nonagenarian mother (born in 1932) about her childhood in the Soviet Union. Her parents (the director’s grandparents) were Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and such was the fate of approximately 3,000 Spanish children. That was presumably for their own protection, given that the Nationalists (the Francoists who eventually won the War) were rabidly anticommunist. The exact reason is left for us to speculate, as this is something the helmer and scribe fails to investigate in more detail.

Most of this taut and concise 73-minute film consists of an extensive talking heads interview with Pérez-Quiroga’s mother, and the directorsscouring through a trove of mementos of a family history that now belongs firmly to the past. Mum explains that she moved to Crimea via Saint Petersburg, after boarding a ship in her native Basque Country at the age of roughly four. She spent roughly two decades living in different parts of the USSR living with other Spanish children of roughly the same age, while her parents remained in Spain. They belonged to a small cultural bubble, being taught in Spanish, and first learning Russian at ninth grade. Her contact to Russian culture was somewhat limited, with some fond memories of a doting teacher, and the gymnastics lessons. Mum eventually returned to Spain and then migrated to Portugal through marriage.

This simple yet heartwarming family story straddles various nations, and it becomes microrepresentative of the geopolitics of an era. Mum is clear and eloquent enough to sustain a conversation, even if her memory often fails her (not uncommon for someone of her age). Once asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, mum promptly replied: “tank pilot”. This amusing anecdote illustrates a childhood defined by hardship and war. Her sentiments upon returning to a Spain under Franco’s authoritarian grip are also very revealing: mum explains that she didn’t feel anything when she went back “home”. That’s probably because she left the country at a very young age, and her recollections were very vague. She confesses that the memory of being forced onto a ship are the only vivid ones of that time.

While interesting and relatable (my father too was also a Spanish immigrant forced upon a ship on his own at a ver young age), this is a story told without flair, vigour and originality. There is very little archive footage of the time, and the director fails to compensate this with creative and effective solutions, or plain austerity. Instead, she opts for clumsy split screens and unnecessary jump cuts, combined with hackneyed symbolisms (a “mama” note inside a bottle thrown at sea) and meaningless b-roll (archive images of snow, a rainbow and trees). The outcome is infantile.

Pérez-Quiroga, who often appears in front of the camera, makes a bold assertion: she is Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian. She bemoans the invasion of Ukraine as if the country was an integral part of her life. She believes her mother’s immigrant experience long before she was born defines her. Yet she travels neither to Russia nor to Ukraine for the purpose of this documentary. While well-meaning, the diretor’s claim to vicarious national identity is not convincing enough,

Where Do You Call Home? just premiered at IndieLisboa.