How to build a Nation

When I was 14 I ran away from home. My flight was short-lived, as I was already back home by dinner time. That afternoon I wandered around the city. When it began to rain, I took shelter in a cinema. The English Patient was on: I was glad it was 3 hours long. I don't think I have ever been so invested in a movie ever since. Cast away from my home and convinced I would never get back, the world on the big screen was my new home. I wanted to inhabit it completely.

Cinemas are my favourite places in a city. I missed them during the pandemic. They are a both a public and private space.

My first movie post lockdown has been Nación by Margarita Ledo Andion. Besides being a director, she is the head of faculty of Science of Communication at the University of Santiago. She is also a communist and an outspoken member of the Galician nationalist movement (her radical ides a forced her to emigrate during the Spanish dictatorship).

Nación is an interesting choice for the title of a movie about a specific group of female factory workers who fought for their right. Compared to “homeland”, which has a masculine, war-tinged connotation, nation is the place where rights are claimed for the community.

Nación is hard to define, it is a hybrid creature, it blurs the borders between genres: documentary, political manifesto and arthouse cinema. There are professional actors who speak into the camera and people who play themselves, the women who worked at Pontesa, the ceramic factory that opened in 1961 near Vigo, in the southwest of Galicia. In 2001 they were unceremoniously dismissed when the factory went busted after being sold: the last months of their salary still unpaid.

The film begins and ends with the words of Eva Veiga, a Galician poet, who stands on the threshold of this work like a priest at the entrance of a temple. As we enter, we watch the original footage of the 1972 strike in Vigo, the seminal moment that defined the democratic fight in Galicia. The female workers are interviewed, invited to talk about what it meant, in the 60s, to be a woman with a disposal income.

As rias baixas, the typical Galican landscapes of inlets and estuaries is the backdrops of the fights, memories and hopes of the dwellers. At the end, there is the striking scene of a woman cutting through the thicket grown inside the ruin of a house; as she makes her way in, her story of abuse surfaces. Later, we see another woman climbing up a cliff. Like a seabird, she opens her mouth to modulate her voice. Like in the Greek myth, Philomena, the girl who is raped by her sister’s husband, is turned into a nightingale and her lament becomes a beautiful song.

There is something strong and vulnerable abut this film; cinema is not only a shelter, a refuge into our past; it is a place to to watch our collective memory, mediate over the failures and grow together.