The Spirit of My Mother (1999)
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The Spirit of My Mother Movie Review
The Spirit of My Mother is a 1999 Honduran drama film directed by Ali Allie and starring Johana Martinez. It’s a slight, but culturally authentic movie.
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“We spend so much of our lives waiting for the past to call us“
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A Garifuna woman returns to Honduras to forget her past and rediscover herself. This is a film from Honduras, a country that despite having a solid population size doesn’t have a particularly extensive cinema with this one being their best-known feature. The film is all about Garifuna, which are a people that are genetically a mix between African and indigenous American ancestry. This story honors their culture wonderfully.
It’s, thus, a very important film culturally speaking. Watching it you learn a lot about their culture, especially through the use of music and extensive singing and dancing scenes. These sections stalled the movie’s pace significantly, but at least they were charming and endearing.
I would contend that Ali Allie should have gone down full documentary route for this story. Don’t get me wrong, the plot is solid overall. But the ethnographic elements are so heavily utilized that they interrupted the flow of the main story and hurt it in the long run.
As for that story, I found it quite moving actually. The protagonist doesn’t just travel back to Honduras to rediscover herself and her own culture, but also to deal with the grief over her mother’s passing. It is the scenes where she speaks to the ghost of her mother that are the absolute highlights of the picture. They are honest and raw, thus being all the more emotional.
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The Spirit of My Mother also benefits from a strong central performance from Johana Martinez. She is very charismatic, sympathetic and memorable in the well written role. It’s a shame, then, that the other characters are underutilized or non-existent. The cinematography is very good, capturing well the beauty of the country and the plethora of dances that we see. The music is of course quite memorable. The pacing is just okay, but given that the movie is so short it should have been much more engaging.
The Spirit of My Mother is a moving drama about rediscovering one’s culture and dealing with one’s tragic past. The movie is at its best when it’s dealing with those themes while the ethnographic scenes that are heavy on music, though unique, stalled the pace of the plot significantly. It’s a technically well made and effective film that would have fared much better had it fully gone down the documentary route.
My Rating – 3.5
This is the 15th film in my American Cinema Marathon where I will watch one film from each American country every day. Next up is 🇧🇴.
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