My Two Voices

The title of this documentary could not be more accurate. While the filmmaker is indeed interested in the literal voices of her subjects — Claudia, Ana, and Marinela — who speak candidly about their past and their immigration experiences, Lina Rodriguez is above all committed to giving them a voice. Or rather two: the voice of the migrant, who must adapt to a new world and rebuild her life elsewhere among strangers, and the voice of the fighter, who has managed to survive with resilience and overcome hardships that are almost indescribable. The entire film gives full space to these voices. They occupy the foreground of the narrative, following one another — so much so that we feel as if we are watching these three women flip through memory albums with us, even though they are rarely shown clearly on screen (at least not until the very last minutes). Their voices and their words are so present, so embodied, that the images captured from their respective worlds seem to become living portraits through objects, places, or gestures — hands, legs, earth being gardened, trinkets collected, quiet streets and peaceful roads, hair brushed, beards shaved.

As we move through intimate moments of these ordinary yet magical daily lives, something curious and fascinating happens: the voices begin to take on a hypnotic quality while the scenes draw us in more and more. Even if one does not fully understand Spanish, the words seem to reach us almost by osmosis. Our attention hovers between what we read in the subtitles and what we feel we understand as we linger instead on the serene atmosphere that emanates from the whole. This dance between sharpened focus and conscious reverie turns the film into a kind of waking dream, in which fully understanding every word is perhaps not essential to grasping the clarity of its message or the empathy we feel for the people depicted.

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer