Mama
(Ecuador, 90 min.)
Dir. Ana Christina Benitez
Programme: Persister (World premiere)
Ana Christina Benitez, at 36 years old, seems to have a full life ahead of her. However, after returning home to Ecuador after a joyous trip to Mexico, she receives a concerning diagnosis: breast cancer. That seemingly full life now assumes a perspective of half full or half empty.
Benitez is the “half full” type of woman, though. She decides to endure chemotherapy and beat cancer. Her youngish body helps the odds.
She’s in a relatively new relationship, too, which gives her strength. Her boyfriend, Mateo, agrees to help her through it. He shaves her head when her hair starts to fall out and joins her in putting her plans on hold, even though that pause proves longer than they both anticipate.
It’s COVID times, however, and hospital protocols require Benitez to do it alone. She therefore brings her camera with her, buoyed by a sense instilled in her from her youth that filmmaking offers therapy. She aims to clean her mind while the doctors work on her body.
Mama serves a very personal lens on the procedures that Benitez and women like her face while experiencing breast cancer. She spends hours upon hours sitting in chairs receiving treatment. The malaise proves palpable in Benitez’s modest, no-frills production. One sees little outside the hospital halls, treatment rooms, bathrooms, and therapeutic tubs over the course of the director’s roller coaster ride through cancer.
Doctors, however, have mixed thoughts on the project. Attendant after attendant advises Benitez that she can’t film her treatments. She carries on anyways, capturing some semi-clandestine footage of the ho-hum days in waiting rooms and oncology wards.
Moreover, Benitez frequently turns the camera upon herself to examine the changes in her body. One motif features the director playing with clumps of hair that fall out. She balls them up and twirl them, defying the buzzkill that cancer inserted upon her life.
Lots of Mama simply features the director observing herself in the mirror with a camera. A bit too much of the film simply features these reflective self-portraits, but a method that eventually breaks through the tedium. For example, outside the many mirror shots, Benitez sometimes films as she floats in the water or soaks in the tub, capturing her breasts while they both remain. When a mastectomy necessitates the loss of one of them, though, she refuses to put down the camera. Her bandages, her scars, and, eventually, her semi-flat bust illustrate a survivor’s journey.
Besides her personal expedition, Benitez considers how cancer influences her relationships, especially as she confronts the fact that she’s barely middle-aged. She and Mateo discuss freezing her eggs in case they want children. Mateo, meanwhile, grows impatient with the constant surrounding of disease, sickness, and waiting.
Benitez’s parents, on the other hand, eagerly welcome their daughter home. She finds a loving support network with her parents, even though they don’t always understand the film project that asks them to chat while having drinks and snacks, but they recognize its therapeutic effect.
Mama reflects a specific approach to personal filmmaking. One gets the sense that Benitez simply films as she goes. It obviously isn’t a project with much forethought—nobody plans to get cancer that young—and sometimes it seems that Benitez’s exercise proves cleansing for her without forcefully conveying the larger purpose. The interpersonal endgame often remains elusive. However, if anyone finds Mama as helpful an experience to watch as it obviously was for Benitez to make, then perhaps that’s the point. Fears of going into this journey alone, not knowing what to expect and how to feel, might be put at ease because Mama shares these emotions so starkly.
Mama screens at Hot Docs 2025.
Get more coverage from this year’s festival here.
