It isn’t every filmmaker who can check in on a subject and capture a similar scene as they might’ve nearly 50 years prior, but that’s what the crew of “Norita” could see as Nora Morales de Cortiñas spoke before thousands at a rally for safe and legal abortions in her native Argentina at the Plaza de Mayo. She had first become a fixture at the country’s oldest public square in 1977 to protest the disappearance of her son Gustavo at the hands of the military junta that pulled any perceived enemies off the streets and inspired others to come forward, eventually leading a movement known as the Madres at the Plaza de Mayo that no government could afford to be impervious to. In her nineties when directors Jayson McNamara and Andrea Tortonese caught up with her, she was no less inspiring – or fiery – as she speaks to the masses, more comfortable standing up than sitting down for interviews with the two when speaking about herself has never been of much interest personally but she continues to feel the call of sharing her wisdom.
“Norita” allows Cortiñas’ voice to reverberate even after her passing in June 2024 at the age of 94, holding on long enough to see Argentina perhaps not learn from the past as the far-right Javier Milei was elected to the presidency and where the threat of fascism looms larger than it has in contemporary times internationally. As she attests, she couldn’t have ever expected to become political, but Gustavo’s own desire not to sit on the sidelines as the country was on the precipice of a revolution in the 1970s led her to become more engaged as he told her “you have to look beyond your four walls,” and after his arrest and subsequent disappearance, she suddenly was the one to lead vigils at the Plaza de Mayo. McNamara and Tortonese show the toll this took on her while becoming such a pillar of strength for others experiencing the same thing when an unrelenting quest for justice for her eldest son came at the expense of time spent with her younger son Marcelo and threats to her husband Carlos, who was a civil servant.
Producer Sarah Schoellkopf would come to know Cortiñas as she studied abroad in the 1990s and the cases of the disappeared remained in the news throughout the early 2000s when investigations were reopened into the government’s actions to attempt to deliver some peace of mind to the thousands of families that lost loved ones without any idea about their ultimate fate, and their connection proved crucial for the tender portrait of the activist who spent more time looking to make progress than to look back. With the film forging its own path as its main subject did as far as its release, currently bootstrapping it across to college campuses and screenings around the world awaiting more formal distribution as it makes a run at the Oscars, Schoellkopf graciously took the time to talk about how the film came together, how Cortiñas’ story of rededicating her life to advocacy led her to reconsider her own purpose professionally and the film addressing history and speaking to the present moment simultaneously.
How did this come about?
I knew Nora for three decades, and I had an internship with her organization when I was a study abroad student at the University of Buenos Aires and we became fast friends because I kept returning. I loved Argentina. I went back with academic and social justice grants and I did a Fulbright study and my master’s research there, so Nora’s been part of my whole adult life, basically. And the Madres were not only an academic subject, but dear and beloved friends [of mine] so in 2018, [I was] at the University of Alabama and organized a series of lectures for her to do in the southern part of the United States. It was a really interesting time because it was the first kingdom of a certain individual who’s our president right now and she spoke at the University of Alabama. On that trip, she mentioned that Francisco Villa, Jayson McNamara, and Andrea Tortorese had started filming her for a documentary [during her] pro-women’s rights, pro-abortion activism.
She was very reticent. She had so much life and personality, but she was not about her own story. She was about the disappeared stories. The Madres is a collective. And she told me about it, and I said, “Well, you’re like my family. I’d love to support this,” and initially I got involved just doing GoFundMe fundraisers, making sure my friends, family, academics knew about it. But it was the pandemic when we were all on lockdown that I had a three-hour conversation with Jayson McNamara and that was the moment I think he realized that if I came on in a bigger way to the team, I would help them really suss out who Nora was. I’ve known her for so long and it started as executive producer credit, and now I’m the lead producer, so I basically pivoted my whole career to get this movie done.
Through a process like this, do you actually get to know Nora in any way better than you have previously?
Completely. Nora was my surrogate grandmother, the last person dancing at my wedding with my mom and she’s a very important person to me. She sadly passed last May, but she saw a final cut of the movie and loved it and to see her interviewed, and to hear these stories, it’s like she is alive on screen and you see a part of her. Specifically one interview I’m thinking of, where she breaks and is very emotional, talking about Gustavo, her disappeared son, Nora knew how to give testimony in a very engaging and not tragic way, which is an incredible skill, but that was Nora. But you really see Nora in all of her intimacies and complexities, and I knew this intellectually, but to see the relationship with her [other] son [Marcelo], who has not disappeared, really talked about in terms of his feelings of loss and abandonment by his mom, and her guilt about that, it’s really powerful.
I know that you did your own dissertation on this period of time in Argentina and the film is well-structured. Was it difficult to figure out how to put this story on the screen?
We had an incredible team of two editors, Julia [Straface] [who worked on] an Argentine kind of cut and then we brought on Ana Garcia, who is Chilean Mexican and intimately connected [the story] to the dictatorship there, so we brought people in who really understood what it is to have a disappeared person, what authoritarianism is, and what a lack of rights is, and I think Ana had an eye to really understand a more international audience. Both of them just did a beautiful job and then we had another producer, Melissa Daniels, who was also very helpful in this final editing process. And it was really collaborative.
I was very moved by Ana Maria’s story in this as well, which becomes a parallel to Nora’s as a more present-day story since she’s younger, but also from the perspective of someone that was disappeared and became an activist as a result. Was she always going to have such a prominent role in the movie?
She was always in the mix because she is sort of Nora’s adopted child, [her] answer to losing her son to the dictatorship, and she was going to be involved no matter what because she knows Nora so well. But Ana Maria needs her own documentary, quite frankly, because she has so many things that have occurred in her life and such triumph after all of these tragedies — Ana Maria was disappeared, reappeared, went into exile, and lived the trauma. Her mother was one of the original Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Esther Careaga, who went back to the plaza after [Ana Maria] reappeared and said, “I’m going to march with you because my kid returned, but they all need to return. They’re all our children.” And that is an incredible example of community, and [Esther] was actually the boss when Pope Francis worked in a laboratory. She was his boss, so there’s so many fascinating connections between many of these people in Argentine history, and I do believe that Pope Francis, had a more empathetic view [in terms of] these dictatorships because he had personally been affected by the fact his boss had been disappeared.
Beyond the interviews, this seems like a massive undertaking when it comes to all the archival material involved. Did you know from your own work where a lot of this footage from the plaza was?
This was Jayson McNamara. His background is really archival producing, and he knew exactly where to go and as the lead producer, we were worried about cost because we’re a very independent production, but [Jayson] was able to find so many different cuts of archive that maybe weren’t as polished, but were actually part of the Argentine archive and the current president [Millei] has locked a lot of that down, but we were able to acquire many of those archive vignettes during the final days before his presidency. They’re really powerful because they’re really raw and gritty and you do get the sense, I’m thinking of this sequence where the military is encroaching on average citizens, ripping them out of their jobs and off the street, they have that footage — and it’s probably police footage, which is also shocking — and again, the editors Ana Garcia and Julia Straface, did an incredible job [of placing it].
As you keep alluding to, it seems like the timing just worked out in so many different ways and it’s incredibly relevant to the moment we’re in now globally. What’s it been like getting this out there?
I was doing screenings last April for fundraising, as the lead producer and it was a powerful story. Of course, women’s rights were being taken away in this country because the loss of Roe v. Wade and [this film] depicted the pro-choice movement in Argentina, so I felt like that was our moment. Little did I suspect we would be in a second regime, and it would be even more pertinent and I feel this guilt that this movie is so pertinent because it means what’s happening all over the world, especially in our country. At the same time, I’m so proud to be going to universities and schools and screenings and film festivals and theaters and talking about the parallels to what is happening in our country right now and what I say many times is you look at the [‘70s archival] footage and you think you’re watching the nightly news. There’s this one scene where a young woman is on the street and she has these fantastic boots, wearing a skirt and she looks like she could be in downtown L.A. last June [demonstrating against] ICE. It’s pretty shocking.
As a former academic, so many of my colleagues and friends have said, “We want to bring you to campus. Just a month ago, I was at the University of Alabama and that was so powerful because these students are thinking about these things, seeing what’s happening and watching their brains light up like light bulbs and the post-screening conversation has my little teacher soul aflame with joy. I come from education, and this is another way of teaching. So it’s incredible. I feel like this is such an important movie and people can use it as a parallel [to understand this moment]. You don’t have to directly say anything, people can make that leap and it’s just been incredibly gratifying.
And honestly, we did not suspect that. We were honoring Nora. This story is really important to tell. It’s like what many organizations do with the Holocaust. You want to capture these incredible survivor stories before they pass. I’m so grateful. Her family is so grateful. Her son said to me at our Argentine premiere at a film festival where we won Best International Documentary, “This is the best homage you could give my mother. It’s better than a book. It’s better than a museum. She is living on camera.” And for me personally, who adored her as a human, it’s just really wonderful that she’s getting her flowers, if you will, because she never wanted those flowers. She’s never been about herself. She’s been about the cause, the movement, the disappeared, the madres.
“Norita” does not yet have distribution, but a full list of upcoming screenings is here.