The women in my family have difficulty in expressing their innermost feelings and in relating to the world around them. The hard life in the countryside made them tough like the bark of a tree, and their children had to learn from their silences. Origin, memory, roots. Our inheritance is in their hands, and it has been up to me to build this story with what still remains of my ancestors, as well as of others who were persecuted after the Spanish Civil War and who now rest in the mountains that surround our house.
My family’s village isn’t out of some magical realist novel, but it could be. LA HOJARASCA is a film about ghosts, unexpected encounters and family reconciliations. It deals with two ways of understanding the world from the confines of the metropolis: my own uprooted point of view, through which I decide to tell the story of my family in order to understand my own roots; and that of the women in my family, who are not interested in trivial facts like the history of their town or even the origin of their family, and relate better to the supernatural instead.
My intention is not to look for answers, but to accept their lack, to enter fully into the legitimate realm of stories where the memory of our ancestors invariably flows. I have woven together my memory with the threads of fiction and reality to form a seamless tapestry where dream and reality coexist naturally.
Macu Machín
