Mujer Hoy — Little Spain among four documentaries of obligatory viewing
Rosa Gil, Mujer Hoy — 3 January 2015
On 3 January 2015 the Spanish weekly Mujer Hoy ran a documentary selection by Rosa Gil, under the title “Como la vida misma” — like life itself. Four films were chosen. Little Spain was one of them.
The piece opens by asking whether we are living through a new golden age of the documentary — “¿Estamos viviendo una nueva era dorada del documental?” — and names Blackfish, Searching for Sugar Man and The Act of Killing as the works that had earned the question. Against that standard it presents its four, in the writer’s phrase, “cuatro cintas de visionado obligado”: four films of obligatory viewing.
Mujer Hoy, 3 January 2015. Full page.
Mujer Hoy, 3 January 2015 — “Como la vida misma” (full page, PDF)
The four
The company a film keeps in a selection like this is the measure of it. The four were:
- A Small Section of the World — the journey of a cup of coffee to the hands that drink it, narrated by Alanis Morissette, who also wrote the soundtrack.
- Little Spain — the Spanish emigrant community of New York, “cuyos personajes y lugares rescata del olvido”: whose people and places it rescues from oblivion.
- Camino a la escuela — the daily journey of four children to school, winner of the César for best documentary, released in Spain three weeks after the piece appeared.
- She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry — on the feminists of the nineteen-sixties, “las mujeres que lo cambiaron todo”, already acclaimed, the magazine noted, as one of the best films of the year.
A César winner, an internationally distributed film narrated by a Grammy-winning musician, a celebrated American feminist history — and a first documentary by a first-time director about a vanished Manhattan neighbourhood. That is the sentence worth keeping about this page.
What it said about the film
The entry turns on the women of the quarter, and it is the reason the film sat in this particular selection at all.
“Otras mujeres que lucharon por los suyos contra viento y marea fueron las de la comunidad de emigrantes españoles en Nueva York … cuyos personajes y lugares rescata del olvido Little Spain.”
“Other women who fought for their own against wind and tide were those of the Spanish emigrant community in New York … whose people and places Little Spain rescues from oblivion.”
Rosa Gil, Mujer Hoy, 3 January 2015
A still from the film was published with the piece. At the time, the magazine told readers, the DVD could be bought through the Spanish Benevolent Society — La Nacional, at 239 West 14th Street, the building where much of the film was shot.
The month it appeared
This was the opening of the film’s run in the Spanish press. The selection ran on 3 January 2015. Two days later ABC carried José María Carrascal’s piece on its opinion pages, calling the film the best present he had been given that Christmas. On 15 January United Press International reviewed it in New York. By 2 February it had won the Latin ACE Award.
Related
- ABC — “Little Spain en Nueva York”, 5 January 2015
- United Press International, 15 January 2015
- The Latin ACE Award, 2015
- The history of Little Spain, Manhattan
- La Nacional — the Spanish Benevolent Society, 1868–2000
- All press coverage