Wiser With Age

Category: Advice

  • How the film, “Mamacita,” became a lesson on the power of forgiveness

    How the film, “Mamacita,” became a lesson on the power of forgiveness


    A woman with short hair wearing red necklace.

    It was a chilly October night when “Mamacita†had its New York premiere at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History. However, Mexico-born and raised filmmaker/director José Pablo Estrada Torrescano warmed the auditorium as he announced his first feature-length film – a documentary about his grandmother, a self-made entrepreneur who proudly created an empire in Mexico’s beauty industry.

    “I made it with my heart – struggling, sweating…†said Estrada Torrescano, 37, on the stage.

    In the film, he also mentions a painful period in his life when, at 13, his mother passed away, and because of that, he lived only with his two brothers who were 16 and 18 years old. During this time in his life, he says he felt alone and abandoned by the rest of his family. Little did he know that embarking on this filmmaking experience would lead him to encountering some much needed personal inner-healing, as well as to establishing a bond with his usually emotionally distant grandmother.

    Here is a Q & A with Estrada Torrescano about how making this film ended up being a life-changing experience for him, as well as for his grandmother (who turned 100 today):

    What made you decide to make a film about your Mamacita, and how long did it take to complete?

    Before leaving Mexico City to study film in Prague, I told my family during a Christmas party that I was quitting mathematics, after it being my profession for 10 years, in order to follow my heart and study film. My grandmother, Mamacita, was very excited about it and made me promise to make a film about her life. I didn’t take it seriously at the moment, but after finishing my studies, I didn’t know what to do, so I told my professors about Mamacita’s life, and their reaction was amazing, so I finally decided to do her film. This was six years ago! The film took all these years to be finished, since I did it completely independently. At the moment of shooting, I decided not to have a script, or anything to guide me, except my intuition…I managed to get the resources to shoot thanks to a crowdfunding campaign…We managed to premiere “Mamacita†at HotDocs in Toronto, and even received the Top Audience Pick…

    What really stood out to me in your film is your focus on the concept of forgiveness. Why was this important to you? And what made you realize this is what Mamacita needed to do?

    Since everything was made intuitively, I didn’t know that forgiveness was going to be part of the film. Life just guided me in that direction. It was what was needed to be done, and I just did it… Now that I see things behind, and the fact that I managed to forgive Mamacita and my family, it has been crucial for my own development. And after having experienced that, I want everybody to know that forgiveness is the key! Would you imagine a world where we have all forgiven our family, friends and even our enemies? Where we have managed to let go all our regrets, our pain, our suffering? That would be paradise! And we could achieve it, if we would have the courage to confront our internal world without judging it – just seeing it, learning from it, understanding it. Being open to knowing that what others have done to us is because of their own ignorance and limitations – ignorance and limitations that we also have! We might not have the same limitations, but our own. And if we accept that, if I forgive myself for having them, then I can forgive others for having them as well.

    Did the forgiveness element of the film take place at the end of your stay? 

    Yes, “the secret thing that I did†to Mamacita for her to achieve forgiveness was in the end of my 3-month stay in Mexico City. It took me a long time to decide to do “it.†When Mamacita sensed that I was doubting, she said, “You know José Pablo, there are times when one needs to take a risk and do things,†so I took it as an invitation and did it.

    Do you think she has had a healing experience? How would you describe how she changed?

    I think that the whole process of doing the film was a healing experience for her. Before arriving to Mexico to shoot, Mamacita –who was 95 years old at that time– was constantly in a really bad mood. She was continuously fighting with her daughters, and with the people who work for her in her house. But having a camera in front of her, and somebody doing a film about her, made her so happy. She was the best person to work with! When I left Mexico, her daughters and the rest of the family started to come to eat at her house with her everyday, like in the old times. Mamacita is super happy now that her film is being seeing all around the globe in festivals.

    What about for you? How did this whole experience change/heal you?

    This has been possibly the best thing that I’ve done in my life. It was a life-changer. Not only because now I am a filmmaker, and have some kind of success, but most importantly because of having achieved forgiveness. For me to having forgiven my family was a HUGE thing, but it was not easy at all!

    After finishing the editing of the film, I had to confront many feelings that came out after more that 20 years of being repressed. This was probably the most difficult thing that I have experienced in my life. Those three months were like being in hell, and I’m not exaggerating. But after the worst night of them all, I woke up as if I was in paradise! All the terrible feelings just came out of my system, and peace and bliss were there now. I even thought that I was going to die. Anyhow, I’m just telling all this very personal stuff so more people dare to confront their fears, confront their pain. Look at yourself as you really are, learn from yourself, without judging.

    What is the most important thing do you think you learned from your Mamacita?

    Mmm…The logline of the film is “It’s never too late to forgive,†and just now, thanks to your question, I understood that’s the most important thing that I’ve learned from my grandmother, Mamacita.

    This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

  • Filmmaker reflects on grandmother in film, “306 Hollywood”

    Filmmaker reflects on grandmother in film, “306 Hollywood”


    A woman with short hair wearing red necklace.
    The late Annette Ontell, owner of 306 Hollywood, Hillside, NJ.

    Jonathan Bogarín, 40, and his sister Elan Bogarín, 36, loved their grandmother so much, they immortalized her on film.

    The Jewish-American matriarch, Annette Ontell, passed away on April 4, 2011 at age 93 – leaving behind only memories, and artifacts, in her house at 306 Hollywood Ave. in Hillside, NJ, which she lived in for 70 years.

    A woman with short hair wearing red necklace.

    The house was stark white – as if predestined to become the perfect canvas for the film that would be created after her death – using the artifacts from her life as props. She was a middle class fashion designer, with a sense of humor, who loved to make dresses fit for the Rockefellers, and she’d always make a duplicate for herself to wear.

    The brother and sister filmmaking duo named their award-winning film “306 Hollywood,†and its artistically mastered ethereal style, for such a weighty subject matter, landed it in Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. After successful showings in NYC, and Los Angeles, it will be screening next in theaters in Dallas, Portland and Seattle, and on Amazon next year.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi_b_VdwazU

    “Making the film, made it easier to let the house go – the memories that we hold, and the cultural space that it holds. I can walk in and be in a 1970’s Jewish-American family,†says Jonathan.

    The idea for the film gradually developed. Elan and Jonathan started filming their grandmother 10 years before her death.

    “My sister was in film school when we started filming. Since we went to [our grandmother’s] house every single week, this added to the relationship,†says Jonathan.

    A woman with short hair wearing red necklace.
    Filmmakers, and grandchildren of Annette Ontell, Elan Bogarín and Jonathan Bogarín

    Elan would ask her straight forward questions you might not normally ask someone if you weren’t filming like, “Grandma are you vain?,†“Do you miss sex?,†and “Are you scared of dying?â€

    She’d always respond honestly and with her extraordinary wit.

    Here, Jonathan answers a few questions about the influence his grandmother had on his life:

    What is your most vivid memory of your grandmother since you were a little boy?

    It was more a feeling than a specific memory. She was a person who always made you feel better. She was a consistently supportive person who was always concerned for our well-being – the things she would do like make you food and made sure you ate enough.

    And your most vivid memory as an adult?

    It’s more of a lesson than a memory. It was her philosophy on how to live life. Despite the tragedies in her life, she’d always empathize with others. She taught us how to handle what life throws at you, and be kind and loving to others, and to find humor in situations. She did it all the time.

    What is the most important piece of life advice that she might have told you, or taught you, by the way she lived?

    Now I have a daughter who is 4 and a half years old. And it’s important to me to transmit the secular Jewish culture to her from my grandmother, and also the Latino culture that comes from my father. She set such an amazing example of how to keep the family together – worry about the things that are important, and not the things that are not as important.

  • Author Bob Brody: A note of thanks, on my dad’s behalf

    Author Bob Brody: A note of thanks, on my dad’s behalf


     

    A woman with short hair wearing red necklace.
    Bob Brody’s father, Lee Brody, as a boy. (Courtesy Bob Brody)

    Ask me for my favorite Thanksgiving story and here’s what I’ll now have to tell you.

    In 1930, a certain 4-year-old in Newark had yet to speak a single word. So his mother took her first-born son to see a series of physicians for a diagnosis.

    It turned out that my future father had been born almost completely deaf.

    Two of those doctors recommended sending Lee Brody to a private school, the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID), a kind of Harvard for deaf children, more than 800 miles away in St. Louis, Mo.

    My grandparents, despite such heavy expense during the depths of the Great Depression — my Poppa ran a saloon — took that advice.

    My father arrived at CID in 1931 and graduated in 1941. There, he learned to speak, to listen, to read lips and to function as well as any hearing person. That much I knew.

    But then, two years ago, some old letters arrived in my sister’s mailbox, and from an unlikely source: the woman my father had lived with after he divorced my mother. We’d had no contact with her in the 18 years since my father died in 1997. Our family had long presumed such letters to be either non-existent or long lost.

    One of the letters revealed a reality about my father that I neither knew nor ever had cause to suspect. In 1936, with my father now 10 years old and already five years into his stay at CID, my Poppa ran out of money to foot the bill. My father was pulled out of his classes to return to Newark and enroll in a public school.

    My Nana then evidently wrote a letter to Dr. Max Goldstein, the prominent ear, nose and throat physician who had founded CID in 1914 and served as its executive director. She informed him that her son was performing poorly in the new school and pleaded for the institute to accept him back.

    In response, Dr. Goldstein wrote, “I can readily appreciate your own disappointment in his limited progress (in Newark) . . . and your satisfaction with Irwin’s progress while with us.†She had “made a very frank statement of your family’s financial affairs.â€

    Dr. Goldstein then agreed to lower the annual tuition fee for my father to $900.

    “I hope this concession in the tuition fee will make it possible for you and Mr. Brody to have Irwin return to CID next September,†he wrote, “for I know it will be for the child’s good and will contribute much to your happiness.â€

    As a result, my father returned to CID the following semester and stayed there for five more years. He would graduate from Weequahic High School in Newark, and then from Rutgers, among the few deaf students ever to do so.

    Much later, my father — now age 42, with a wife, two children and a full-time job managing real estate — founded a nonprofit organization, New York-New Jersey Phone-TTY, headquartered in Hackensack. Partnering with IBM and AT&T, among others, he was instrumental in establishing a network of specially adapted teletypewriters, or TTYs, from coast to coast.

    As a result, millions of people with hearing impairments could, in written messages transmitted instantaneously, “speak†with each other as never before. The TTYs also connected the deaf and hard-of-hearing for the first time to police stations, firehouses, hospitals, airports and government.

    Later, my father received a personal letter of appreciation from then-President Ronald Reagan. Bell Telephone’s Pioneers Club inducted him as only its 29th member since 1911. The Stevens Institute of Technology held a memorial service in his honor that drew 500 mourners. Gallaudet University, the world’s only higher education institution for the hearing-impaired, named a scholarship after him.

    My father confided to me more than once throughout my boyhood that without his education at CID, he might never have accomplished much of anything. And he often expressed his gratitude, justifiably so, to his parents for funding it all at considerable sacrifice. No doubt he learned only later about the letter his mother sent to CID arguing her case for his return.

    And so a certain question now haunts me. What would have happened to him without Dr. Goldstein’s altruism? We’ll never know. So, in keeping with the spirit of Thanksgiving, Dr. Goldstein, I thank you. As a pioneer in education, you made possible a pioneer in communications. I thank you for seeing the future in my father.

    This article was originally published on NYDailyNews.com. Bob Brody is the author of the new memoir, “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age,†and you can read more about him here. 

  • Random moments remind me of lessons my father taught me

    Random moments remind me of lessons my father taught me


    A woman with short hair wearing red necklace.
    Nayeli Chavez-Geller with her father, Raymundo Chavez.

    I often think about my father.

    I find myself engaged in the most mundane of my daily activities, and I randomly remember some of our conversations. I treasure them like old video cassettes – worried at times that they will fade off if I think about them too much.

    My parents got divorced when I was five years old, and I am the eldest of four siblings. My mother, who is from New York, met my father in Oaxaca, Mexico and returned back home after their separation – giving him sole custody over us. I don’t remember much about the days living with both of my parents. It’s as if life started one day when I was at elementary school and all my friends pointed out to me, “Nayeli, your father is outside the school waiting for you.”

    Looking back, I guess we were the topic of conversation in other households – the four “gueritos” (a Mexican slang term meaning “light-skinned people”) that just by their physical appearance stood out like a needle in a haystack and were being raised by their father in a time where every kid in my classroom lived with both of their parents, and in the rarest scenario with their mother.

    My father was very devoted, but an authoritarian figure who was very strict with us. He believed in what he called “an integral education.” We had to excel both academically, and in sports. He also believed it was very important to have social skills. I remember one day he hit me with a belt for something that was not my fault. At night, when I went to kiss him before bed, he actually apologized. I seized that unusual moment of understanding and asked him why he was always so harsh with us? He told me it was because he knew that as good as we seemed, we hadn’t reached our potential, and that as a father, it would be a crime not to ask for more if he truly knew we had the capacity for it.

    I have been living on my own since I was 17, and I always remember that moment. I guess it’s a motor of motivation when things get too comfortable or tough.

    My father was born in a village that he’d take us to often, while we were growing up, to visit my grandmother. Once there was a bull running loose on the streets, and my first instinct was to run away from it, but my father got really mad, and he told me, “How can you turn your back on it, Nayeli? In life, you must face the bull in order to see which way to run.”

    I learned later that there is even a known phrase, “Grab the bull by the horns,” and hearing that for the first time reminded me of that moment.

    When I feel depressed, anxious, or overwhelmed, I force myself to go out for a run. I then start hearing his voice again,”Happiness isn’t permanent, you have to fight for it. This is your life, you can make the best of it, or be a victim. There aren’t any guarantees. Be the best that you can be. Remember time goes by, don’t waste your youth. You are free. I gave you wings to fly, and the skills to survive no matter what. Go out in the world, and be happy.”

    Nayeli Chavez-Geller is a reporter and correspondent for Univision television network, and she resides in New York City.

  • Ponca tribe councilwoman explains activism at Standing Rock and why it’s not over

    Ponca tribe councilwoman explains activism at Standing Rock and why it’s not over


    A woman with short hair wearing red necklace.
    Casey Camp Horinek speaks inside of the United Nations COP21 Climate Negotiations during a WECAN International event (Photo: Emily Arasim/Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network)

    Casey Camp-Horinek has a gentle demeanor, with her long, salt and pepper-colored hair and lyrical voice. However, there is searing fire behind her caring, dark eyes.

    She was born into the Ponca Nation, a Native American tribe originally from the Nebraska/South Dakota area, and which is now scattered throughout the U.S. Camp-Horinek lives in north central Oklahoma, where approximately 800 reside.

    In addition to being a mother, grandmother, and councilwoman of the Ponca Nation, Camp-Horinek – who turns 69 next month – is an activist for all of us.

    Camp-Horinek was one of the thousands peacefully protesting at against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota, last year. And last month, she came to New York City accompanying other indigenous women leaders from across the U.S., and around the world, for the conference, ‘Indigenous Women Protecting Earth, Rights and Communities’, presented by the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) to educate the public, as well as CEO’s and shareholders, about renewable energy, earth awareness, and indigenous issues.

    “Many of us believe in a seven generation philosophy,†explains the indigenous leader about why she does not give up fighting for justice. “We believe that our people, the past seven generations before, have prayed for us to live in a good way. It is our responsibility in the decisions that we make that we should care for seven generations to come.â€

    Camp-Horinek hails from a large family. She’s been married 48 years and has four adult children, and over a dozen grandchildren.

    “I feel very very fortunate that our family is very integrated in terms of being able to hang out with one another,†she says. “Our grandchildren visit us regularly. We travel, pray, eat and laugh together. Intergenerational life is part of indigenous life. What drives me to activism and environmentalism is a duty of a grandmother, woman, wife, and daughter to carry on the relationships of all living things and caring about what happens to the generations to come.â€

    Going to Standing Rock, last summer and autumn, was part of that duty.

    “It was a horrible, racist, militarized situation,†says Camp-Horinek. “We had more than a thousand arrested, made into less than human feelings.â€

    On October 27, 2016, she says 141 people, including herself, and her sons, were arrested while praying.

    “They wrote numbers with markers on our arms…I’m Standing Rock 138,†says Camp-Horinek, adding that she’s not washing off the ink until she goes to trial in July so she can show the judge. “They put us in these bear cages in a basement…[and] they had militarized tasers, mace and pepper spray in containers the size of fire extinguishers.â€

    She says growing up on the reservation, she and her people have become used to living with racism, but now she feels they also have to deal with environmental racism.

    She describes a Taiwainese business that’s producing carbon, as well as Oklahoma gas lines, fracking, and earthquakes happening as a result of it, as “an environmental genocide†on her people.

    “We are one of the cancer capitals of the world – children and elders are dying of cancer,†says Camp-Horinek. “There is a long process that brought us to this. The way the federal government has failed its responsibility to the indigenous people.â€

    Her grandfather was born in northern Nebraska, where the original Ponca people came from.

    “In Oklahoma, there are 39 recognized tribes,†says Camp-Horinek. “The other six are there from forced removal. We had no choice but to leave to ‘Indian territory’ – putting us in one general location – on reservations. My grandfather was eight at the time of the forced removal.â€

    “In one generation, we had to leave our hunting, growing organic food and fishing,†she continues. “One in three of us died in our Trail of Tears, and we had to depend on the government commodity foods.â€

    She says being forced to have white flour, white sugar, and dairy – all foods that were foreign to the bodies of her people, caused them to develop all sorts of ailments.

    “Now we have the highest diabetic rate on earth,†says Camp-Horinek.

    As a councilwoman, she’s one of seven trying to make an economic and cultural way forward for generations to come for her people.

    “One of the reasons I’m here today is to stop the expansion of the Keystone XL pipeline,†says Camp-Horinek. “Our kids are 56 percent more likely to develop leukemia, and we already have rampant cancers, and diabetes, and other illnesses. We need to empower our children and great great grandchildren.â€

    She says she would like them to have basic necessities like clean water to drink.

    “In my youth, I could not imagine buying a bottle of water,†she says. “There were natural springs. In our case, there was well water. Now that same well water is completely contaminated from fracking.â€

    What is one piece of advice you wish you could tell yourself when you were 20 with the wisdom you have now?

    “I believe that growth is a healthy, organic, happening, and it has to happen in the manner which your spirit guides you. [You can’t be] constantly looking for the positive growth to take place, that change has to happen in its own way.â€