Tag: family

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

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.

December 3, 2018
Filmmaker reflects on grandmother in film, “306 Hollywood”

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.

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.

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?”

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.

October 15, 2018
Author Bob Brody: A note of thanks, on my dad’s behalf

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.”

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.”

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.

November 23, 2017
Author Bob Brody on “Playing Catch with Strangers”

Bob Brody speaking at his book signing for “Playing Catch with Strangers” at the Forest Hills Library on September 16, 2017. (Courtesy Bob Brody)

In “Playing Catch with Strangers,” an essay published in The New York Times in 2015, Bob Brody writes that he played catch with his father only once in his life.

“That summer afternoon, I felt about as happy as I’d ever felt. That’s how it goes when you’re 8 years old and playing catch with your dad,” writes Brody. “But then my father got busy with work, too busy to play catch with me anymore, always leaving early in the morning and returning late at night, and that turned out to be that. He had to do what he had to do.”

Although short-lived, that special day ignited a flame in Brody’s life that would never extinguish – one that would continually remind him the importance of having fun and nurturing relationships throughout his life. In addition to becoming a public relations executive and a writer, Brody, now 65, still makes it his joyous duty to play catch with anyone who is interested.

His memoir, comprised of the many personal essays he’s written throughout his life about family and special moments, is similarly titled, “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age,” and hit shelves this past June.

“My new book covers my whole life…It’s a celebration,” says Brody. “It’s about my struggle to overcome immaturity. I resisted responsibility for a long time…It wasn’t until I was 35 [when my daughter was born] that I developed a real hard work ethic.”

He says his whole life he’d only wanted to be a writer.

“That ambition took shape when I was 12,” recalls Brody, who ended up writing for his junior high, high school, and then college paper. “My grandfather bought me a New York Daily News subscription so I could read about the Yankees. I appreciated the directness of the language. I really didn’t get serious about writing till I was 18 – in college. Writing for the school paper, I became infatuated with words. I was not much of a storyteller at that point. I was just looking to see what I could do with language. I used to use big words – words that I will probably never use again. I’ve come to recognize short words can be good, short sentences can be good…I like street language too.”

He says if he had to do it all over, he really doesn’t know what else he could’ve become.

“I guess I could’ve become a lawyer, but then I would’ve written about being a lawyer,” says Brody, smiling.

Born in the Bronx, Brody lived there almost three years before migrating to the suburbs of Fair Lawn, NJ. He was always smitten with NYC, however, as he would often sleep over his grandparents’ house there, and his grandmother would take him to all the museums and concert halls, including Radio City Music Hall.

At 23, after majoring in English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, he moved to Manhattan. This momentous occasion also led to his proudest career moment at 26 – getting published in The New York Times.

“I wrote about the time I got mugged five weeks into living in New York City,” laughs Brody, who has since lived in Forest Hills, Queens for the past 40 years.

Since his big break, Brody’s work has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and more. He also wrote the book, “Edge Against Cancer,” which profiles 12 athletes who survived cancer and were able to return to competing in their respective sports.

He says it was when his son and daughter were born that he realized he needed to find another source of income.

“The only option I considered was public relations, because a lot of it is writing,” says Brody, who has now worked in PR for the past 26 years. “I majored in English, but I never trained for public relations. It was a tough adjustment, because for one, I was used to working on my own. I was used to being a solo act. When you work for a public relations firm, I had to learn how to be a teammate.”

At his full-time job, he says his work partly entails writing pitches, ghost writing op-eds, white papers, or memos.

“My ideal life would be to write whatever I wanted for at least three hours a day, but I think PR is good for me,” says Brody, adding that he usually enjoys writing first thing in the morning. “If I had to write only what I wanted, I might get sick of my own voice.”

His first love will always be writing essays though. The very first short story he wrote was about a haunted house when he about 8, and currently, he writes approximately 20 essays a year.

“I love telling a story that’s going to hit people where they live – make them smarter, or get them excited about something,” says Brody. “If I can write anything inspirational, that’s the holy grail. I also like the sense of control. It’s me and the blank screen. Me and the words, and how I want to tell the story. It’s fun to get published. I write to be read. All these years later, and I still never get tired of it.”

He says his five year plan entails writing three more books — the first being called, “Letters to My Kids,” of which he already started an online blog (where he urges others to also write journals to their children), another would be a memoir honoring his deaf parents, and the last would be a memoir about working in public relations.

“When I’ve written about something, I really feel like I’ve lived it,” says Brody about the necessity he feels to document his life with words. “I think I have much of it there in my new book– and it’s about the people closest to my heart.”

There are two pieces of advice about life he’s learned thus far that he would’ve liked to share with his younger self:

“On family – I wish I knew years ago what family means to me now,” says Brody. “I feel I failed early on to realize the importance of family. In some respects, I’m too late and in some, I’m just on time…and work harder. You have less time than you think. The world is never going to come to you so take nothing for granted.”

September 25, 2017
In My (Grand) Mother’s Words: Falling in love

The day I unexpectedly arrived to Honduras for what was supposed to be my grandmother’s 92nd birthday bash, an intimate conversation with my grandmother occurred. We were in her living room, surrounded by people, yet she took a moment to look up at me in the middle of all the commotion, and she asked:

“Victoria, y vos te has enamorado alguna vez?”

(Victoria, have you ever been in love?)

A flood of emotions and thoughts ran through my mind. Why was she asking? Was she serious? Why now? What do I say? I did what I’ve always known is best, I was honest.

Then I asked her, “Y usted? Alguna vez se ha enamorado?” (What about you? Have you ever been in love?)

She replied:

“Si. Dos veces.”

(Yes. Twice.)

I followed-up by asking if one of the two times had been with my grandfather. She said, “no,“ with ZERO hesitation. She’s 92, so back in the day I’m not sure how much of a role love played in starting a family with someone.

I have to say that in the 29 years I’ve known my grandmother, this was probably the most captivating, raw, and real moment I’ve ever had with her. I was so surprised by her curiosity to ask me such a thing, out of nowhere! I was also impressed by her candidness and honesty in replying to me. Many times we’re taught elders ask all the questions, we provide all the answers, and that’s it. This was a conversation. It was a conversation between two women where the barriers of tradition were removed.

Maybe that’s what surprised me the most. This moment, in a way, was my grandmother acknowledging I’m a woman. Not a little girl. Not just her granddaughter. A woman who has had experiences that she wants to know about. It was her way of reaching out, and letting the only granddaughter who hasn’t grown up with her around know that she wants to know who I am. It was her way of telling me know she cares, and whoever did me wrong wasn’t worthy of me anyways.

In true abuela fashion, she was right.

Victoria Moll-Ramirez is a broadcast journalist based in New York City. She is originally from Miami, FL and had the great fortune of being raised by the sassiest, spunkiest, wisest, most hysterical Honduran woman in the world. Victoria’s mother, Bélgica, is 60-years-old, resides in Little Havana (Miami) and enjoys a good margarita accompanied by a heartrending ranchera. Victoria blogs about her mom’s funny and wise sayings on, “In My Mother’s Words.”

May 27, 2016