On the opening night of the fourth Arab-Iberoamerican Women Film Festival (16-20 May) in Cairo, Amaren Idea, (Mother’s Idea, 2009) directed by Maider Oleaga was featured.

The 80-minute documentary features the lives of three Spaniards who were forced to leave their homeland during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and never went back.

During the war, lots of families sent off their children to safe compounds in Mexico and Russia to spare them the agony of the conflict. “But when the Democrats were defeated by Franco’s dictatorship, their children were banned from returning home for 40 years,” explains director Maider Oleaga.

In their quest to go home for the first time in 40 years, the three leading characters of this documentary pour their hearts out, while documenting their lives away from their homeland.

Now in their eighties, Lucia, Jose and Alfredo’s yearning for their childhood memories has no bounds.

“I was always referred to as a Mexican in Spain and a Spaniard in Mexico… One needs to search for one’s roots, or else he’d be a leaf blown in the wind…. I didn’t notice how time went by so quickly.”

From the opening scene to the close, the director takes us down memory lane, with a careful eye on the present. The urge to search for one’s roots, the lost sense of belonging, being constantly out of place and the complex feelings towards the mothers who sent them off in the first place, are melancholic notes that are conveyed in the simplest comments.

The director highlights the strength of these people who have overcome their sorrow and mastered their destinies. There are scenes of one of them with her dozen grandchildren singing for her; the other who realises that the pastry shop he has been longing for all his life is no longer there, so settles for a cake that resembles the one he used to eat as a child, and eats it happily along with his grandson who apparently inherited his sweet tooth.

Now 80 minutes could be a long time, but in this film time flies between the old photographs, personal footage documenting their family life, and a first-hand view of the social history and life style at the time. The director succeeds in sifting through their memories and selecting the simplest, yet most revealing of them all.

One is taken by the small details they convey about themselves; from their signature dishes to the man who fell in love with a Russian woman whose family refused to allow their marriage because he was not Russian; and how one of them used to steal his favourite cake from the fancy pastry shop he could never afford. 

Towards the end of the film, it is revealed to the audience that the three characters managed to visit their home town as part of an event dedicated to the ‘Children of the War in Basque’.

The moment they’ve been dreading and waiting for all their lives arrives. And we are with them to capture the first photograph by the sign of their old street, the hunt for the fancy pastry shop, the family house that has a name: Amaren Idea, (Mother’s Idea) hence the title, and the way one relates to an ancient stone bridge that witnessed the best days of their childhood.

An inspirational documentation of a life less ordinary and far more dramatic than fiction.

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Arab-Iberoamerican Women Film Festival  - Tuesday 17 May 2011 at the Creativity Center, Opera House complex

5 pm: Saat El Tahrir Daqat (Liberation time has come) Documentary 62 minutes/Lebanon 1972, directed by Heini Sorour

A historical document on the imperialism in Oman while featuring the diaries of the resistance

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7 pm: Tabaq el Diaba(The Wolves’ plate) Documentary 30 minutes/Egypt 2009, directed by Mona Iraqi

The film tackles the crime of recycling medical waste instead of disbursing it in post- revolution Egypt.

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7.30 pm:  Al Somal, Ard al Arwah Al Sherira (Somalia, the land of the evil spirits) Documentary 30 minutes/Egypt 2010, directed by Mona Iraqi

A journey in search of the reasons behind the phenomenon of piracy in the Red Sea

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8 pm: Isabel Allende, Documentary 60 minutes/Germany 2008, directed by Paula Rodriguez

This film tackles the life of the renowned Chilean writer, who has inspired women to be the heroines of their own lives.