Cinema became a 'new home' for filmmaker Lina Rodríguez to find her place as an immigrant

Cutaways is a personal essay series where filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This TIFF 2022 edition by Lina Rodríguez focuses on her film So Much Tenderness, which follows a Colombian environmental lawyer who flees to Canada after the death of her husband.

I was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. During my adolescence, I felt like I had a simultaneous connection and disconnection to everything around me. My mother used to say it was due to teenage angst and that it would pass. It still hasn't. As I was looking for different frameworks to think about my place in the world, I came to study film in Toronto. That's where I found cinema.

Cinema became a sort of island — a new home — that allowed me to approach the world and reflect on it from my perspective. But, I still didn't feel like I belonged. The reasons for this were pretty obvious. I had moved here completely by myself, and although I spoke English, I still had an accent and didn't understand many of the jokes and cultural codes and references. I still don't. 

While navigating what it meant to be seen and categorized as a Latin-American woman in this new city (which in itself is a complicated label that comes from the legacy of colonialism), I also started to feel a longing for Colombia, my language and the family and culture I had left behind. It was then that I started making this in-between space my own, using the fact that I didn't feel completely Colombian or completely Canadian as a fertile ground to re-frame my position, as well as to reflect on this new immigrant identity — an identity that is not fixed or clear and whose fluidity and complexity constantly forces me to deal with disparate temporalities, spaces, cultures and languages.

Part of my desire to make So Much Tenderness stems from these feelings of suspension, dislocation and simultaneity that I've been carrying with me since I can remember, and which became heightened as a result of my immigration to Canada. In a way, the film comes from my interest to articulate the elusive search for settledness that I feel as an immigrant, a kind of longing for "a place" that, at the same time, resists and rejects the very idea of belonging. 

During my research, I was also inspired by dozens of interviews I conducted with fellow Colombian immigrants and refugees from a diverse range of circumstances, including friends and leaders in our community. After listening to others' stories and experiences, I realized that although we had immigrated to Canada under different circumstances, we shared similar feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and dislocation. As I started writing the script, I knew this was an opportunity to offer a non-stereotypical glimpse into the immigrant experience through the perspective of Aurora (a passionate and independent Colombian woman interpreted with great sensitivity by the wonderful Noëlle Schönwald) and Lucía (her tempestuous daughter interpreted by the talented Natalia Aranguren, who is part of this year's Rising Stars at TIFF). I was also excited to continue developing my interest in the complexities around the mother-daughter relationship (something I had explored in my prior films Señoritas and This Time Tomorrow), while focusing on how these two women navigate their feelings of displacement and dislocation and deal with a traumatic past, all while trying to settle into their new life in Toronto. 

Throughout the development process of the film, something else became painfully obvious to me. Even if the Latine community (Latine is a gender-neutral form of Latina or Latino) is the sixth-largest visible minority group in the country and one of the fastest growing in Canada and the U.S., the multifaceted dimensions of our histories and identities do not have a presence in mainstream English-Language television and film in this country. 

In conversations about diversity in Canada, I struggle to name a mainstream movie or television show reflecting the specific experience of a Latine Canadian. At the same time, I have no trouble naming stereotypical, whitewashed, and racist portrayals of Latine people in U.S. media. These characters are rarely portrayed as complete people with lives and back-stories like their counterparts, but frequently as minor, one-dimensional characters that are either the butt of the joke, the sidekick, the object of desire or the villain.

Given this unfortunate reality, it was important for me to make a film where I could see at least part of myself and my experience on screen. I remember very clearly a moment during the casting where I was doing an improvisation exercise with Natalia and Augusto Bitter (a Venezuelan-born, Tkaronto-based Dora Award-winning actor, writer and producer who plays one of Lucía's close friends). As I watched them, I couldn't contain my excitement seeing them be the main focus of the scene. 

I was also very moved to hear them effortlessly shift from Spanish to English to Spanglish (my favourite language!) It made me really sad, when later on, as I got to know Natalia better, she told me about how she had to pay a coach to help her "get rid" of her accent so she could have a better chance in the English-language market. Evidently, I had to tell her that for Lucía's role, I was interested in her whole being, and that for me it was instrumental that she spoke English with her natural accent, Spanish and Spanglish. Not only because this is the way our homes and streets sound but because it's also a reflection of the experience of many Latine immigrants in the U.S and Canada.

Although Latines are often incorrectly referred to as a race, we are a pan-ethnicity consisting of peoples of different races, languages, cultures and histories. Many Latines experience some form of prejudice and erasure, but we each experience them differently. Although pretty much absent from our screens, Latines in Canada do exist and I am proud to contribute to the expansion of our on-screen representation with So Much Tenderness.

This year's Toronto International Film Festival runs September 8–18. Find showtimes for So Much Tenderness here.

Missed it at TIFF? Catch it at the Atlantic International Film Festival (September 15–22).