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“What House Are You From?” This is the question posed by the Portuguese-Spanish artist and director Ana Pérez-Quiroga, who gives her name to the documentary that centres on her mother, Angelita.
Taken from Spain to the then Soviet Union as a child, as a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, she ended up leaving one conflict and encountering another: the Second World War.
Estranged from her family and her home country, she only returned to Spain as an adult, trained in medicine, after Stalin’s death. Between the ages of four and 24, she lived in various boarding schools, always in very closed circles with other Spanish children, also war refugees, with lessons in her mother tongue: only later did she learn Russian.
She lived in Kherson, in what is now Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in a small village in Siberia and finally in Moscow, where she went to university.
Angelita didn’t pass on this traumatic experience to her children, quite the opposite: “My mum is a shy and introverted person. She speaks little about this period, but when she does, she has never, as far back as I can remember, given us the idea that this experience was a trauma. I’ve always felt that it was (for her) an adventure,” Ana Pérez-Quiroga told Euronews.
The passage of time, the relationship between mother and daughter and the feeling of belonging to the various places and cultures that Ana’s mother experienced are themes that are always present in the film.
Angelita and her sister returned to Spain in the 1950s, more than 20 years after leaving the country. Their parents, republicans, were spared Franco’s repression and the wave of shootings during the civil war, although their father spent some time in prison.
She then met her Portuguese husband and moved to the estate in the centre of Portugal where the family has a vineyard.
The grape harvest at the family home serves as a metaphor here with the film mixing past and present.
“The film is about time. That’s why we filmed two harvests, two years of harvests in a row. I’m interested in chronological time. I want you to understand that the film has to do with this idea of time, but there’s also another concept behind it, which is that of fracture. Who do we belong to, in terms of identity?” says Pérez-Quiroga.
She hasn’t forgotten her past as a plastic artist either with the film portraying installations and performances she has made on the theme of her mother’s story. Managing to combine these two facets, she says, was the biggest challenge during editing.
It was a multi-year project that took her to various points in Russia and Ukraine before the large-scale invasion and outbreak of the current war in 2022.
What House Are You From? had its world premiere at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival last year and will hit the screens of several Portuguese cities on 16 April.
Video editor • Ricardo Figueira
Additional sources • Imagem: Bruno Silva