Mothers and Daughters: A Conversation with Mariana Saffon

A teenage girl looks on with both envy and disapproval as her mother shimmies on the dance floor in the arms of a lover. “Beautiful,” observes a friend. “I know,” says the daughter, bitterly, before falling asleep in her nanny’s lap, wishing she were nestled beside the twirling, glowing woman instead. Winner of the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film at the 2020 Venice International Film Festival, Mariana Saffon’s Between You and Milagros examines this friction between parent and child, following Milagros (Loren Paz Jara) as she clings desperately to her free-spirited mother. The film, set in rural Colombia, two hours outside of Saffon’s hometown of Medellín, unfolds naturalistically against a richly textured backdrop of flora and fauna, though the idyllic setting never obscures the uncomfortable class tensions that define Milagros’s upper-middle-class upbringing. As her mother (Marcela Mar), an exuberant single woman still in the prime of her life, pursues romance, the ambivalent Milagros is roped into activities with the housekeeper’s daughter and other local kids, leading to a tentative flirtation of her own and an eye-opening confrontation with death.

A coming-of-age tale that doubles as a meditation on the ideals that define motherhood, Between You and Milagros plumbs the complicated relationship between its two protagonists at a transitional moment in their lives with empathy and grace. To celebrate the film’s Criterion Channel premiere (alongside Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young), I spoke with Saffon over video chat about her early influences, her improvisatory approach to filmmaking, and the cultural dynamics that animate the film.

What led you to want to become a filmmaker?: When I was a teenager I used to spend weekends in Bogotá with my stepsister. Because she was in law school, she’d rent films to keep me occupied while she studied. I remember watching six or seven a day and feeling like I was beginning to understand more about myself through them. I was first introduced to films by American and European directors like Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, which I enjoyed, but when I discovered the work of Lucrecia Martel, like La Ciénaga and The Headless Woman, I realized I had found something I could truly connect to on a deeper level. At that point I began taking classes in communications and audiovisual production in Colombia, and eventually I made my first short film while enrolled in a filmmaking course. I then applied to Columbia University’s film program—twice!—and got in on my second attempt. Between You and Milagros was my thesis film for my MFA.

It strikes me as a deeply personal film, partly because it’s set near Medellín, where you grew up.: Everything I do is personal. A lot of the questions I raise in the film are questions I’ve asked myself about my relationship to my mother. When I turned thirty, I had the shocking realization that when my mother turned thirty she was divorced and I was already two years old. I suddenly understood what it must’ve felt like for her as a woman of that age, full of certain needs and desires, to be saddled with such responsibilities. I wanted to go back to that period of her life and reevaluate what she was going through without judgment, while also questioning the contradictions of motherhood—the fact that society expects mothers to be perfect all the time and the judgment they face when they don’t conform to those expectations. It hurt me as an only child to see my mother living her life without paying attention to me sometimes, so I sought to look beyond that hurt and see her for who she truly was. The film was shot in a rural town two hours away from Medellín where I used to spend vacations as a child. I used to dread going, but so much of what has come to define me took place there.

There’s a scene halfway through the film in which Milagros stumbles upon a crime scene and sees a dead body. What were you trying to achieve by portraying this encounter in such an understated way?: The films that have influenced me the most are cumulative rather than plot-driven, like those by Maurice Pialat or Michelangelo Antonioni. These films don’t follow a classical narrative structure. Rather, they are like an assembly of curated moments ripped out of life that might not seem to directly relate to one another but that come together to achieve a kind of truth. I wanted to insert something as seemingly monumental as death while treating it like any other event as a way of foregrounding the fact that this tragedy is just one of many occurrences in Milagros’s life. At the same time, it’s a moment of realization for her, of seeing something she doesn’t understand and being forced to look at the world a little differently because of it.

I was also struck by your depiction of the class divide between Milagros’s family and the housekeepers and their children.: Colombian society is extremely stratified. I was specifically interested in the relationship between Milagros and the “help,” because often those kinds of connections can be deeper than the relationship many wealthy children have with their actual parents. Class hierarchies are extremely apparent yet normalized so that people are more able to live with themselves. I wanted these class differences to unfold naturally and contextualize Milagros’s privileged existence.

Mothers and Daughters: A Conversation with Mariana Saffon

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