TIFF: Lina from Lima
What if you took a relatively ordinary life and spiced it up? And what if the emotional high points could turn into fanciful musical numbers? Written and directed by Chilean filmmaker María Paz González, Lina from Lima is a portrait of a single mom caught in a state of limbo. Magaly Solier stars as Lina, an immigrant from Peru who works for a wealthy family in Chile. She’s preparing to go home to Lima, Peru for the holidays. Without a real home of her own, she spends nights at the empty summer house of her employer, taking care of their daughter, tending to the newly installed pool and sleeping on the plastic covered mattress. She’s excited to see her real family but her teenage son, who lives with her ex-husband, is not interested to see her. Lina goes through the motions, working, partying, dating, buying and wrapping Christmas presents and planning for her big trip. Lina lacks the stability of having a home and a steady relationship. Her transitory experience is peppered with elaborate musical renditions as she tries to imagine a life grander than her own reality.
Lina from Lima is colorful and vibrant as it is ordinary. The spectacle of the musical numbers intermingled with scenes from Lina’s every day life make for an unconventional, bewildering yet ultimately entertaining film. Magaly Solier shines as Lina. She’s a walking contradiction: practical, approachable, drab, luminous, talented and sexy. Solier plays all aspects of Lina seamlessly.
Filmmaker María Paz González was inspired by the wave of migrants particularly from Peru, but also from Colombia and parts of the Caribbean, who traveled to Chile looking for employment and a new lease on life. González says,
“I became interested in those who struggle the most: women; mothers; female workers. In this world I met many women who quickly dove into domestic work to become part of other families, and with women who, despite their years, continued living in temporary places. Migrants who went through different homes without really belonging to any of them. All those women traveled every year to visit their families, only to realize, over time, that they don’t have a home over there either.”
As a daughter of immigrants, I’ve always been curious about how my parents reconciled this sort of split existence with their new physical home but the emotional and familial connection they left behind. My mother came to New England from the Dominican Republic and her twin sister emigrated further north to Alberta, Canada. While they’ve established themselves in their new countries, the concept of home has always been firmly planted in somewhere tropical, warmer and farther away. Like Lina, they struggle to keep the familial connections going from a distance, not with each other but with other members of their family. Lina’s story is the story of many immigrants whether they’ve made a permanent move or not.
I recently saw Lina from Lima at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival where it had its world premiere. The film is a brief 83 minutes and I found it enjoyable perplexing as a mix of comedy and drama, realism and musical fantasy. After my first viewing I immediately wanted to watch it again, if anything for those magical song and dance numbers that just hypnotized me. South American cinema has so much to offer by way of very inventive storytelling by talented filmmakers and actors. Don’t overlook this wonderful Chilean/Peruvian film. If you get a chance to see it, do so!
