The Personal Made Political: An Interview with Norita Producers Sarah Schoellkopf & Melissa Daniels
For over 40 years, mothers and grandmothers have filled Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo to protest the forced disappearances of some 30,000 Argentinians under the military dictatorship of Jorge Videla. Feature documentary Norita, which screened at the Austin Film Festival this week, brings to light the story of Nora Cortiñas, who co-founded the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and became an international human rights icon after her own son was disappeared. Norita uses gripping archival footage and intimate interviews with Nora and the women surrounding her to map her history as an activist, from the brutal days of the dictatorship to her role in the modern-day fight for reproductive rights in Argentina.
We sat down with Norita producers Sarah Schoellkopf and Melissa Daniels to discuss their connection to Nora, the personal and global perspectives of the film, and the feminist message at its heart.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Hyperreal Film Journal (HFJ): Could you walk me through how you got involved in telling this story?
Sarah Schoellkopf (SS): The inception started with, in some ways, my relationship with the protagonist. When I was in college, I had an internship with the human rights organization that Nora helped found. I worked more with other women in the office, but I would see Nora all the time. Then I went back many times with academic grants over the years, becoming closer and closer to Nora. I brought her to the states multiple times for academic conferences and talks, kind of being an impact producer before I knew that was a term. She told me, while she was in the States doing one of these tours with me, “They’re gonna make a movie about me. And I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I really like the director.”
I got to talk to [that director,] Jayson McNamara, for over three hours one day. And he was like, “Oh, you really do know Nora. You have a depth of knowledge.” [Eventually] I took over as a producer, founded a company to produce this movie, realized that I needed help, and—
Melissa Daniels (MD): —and I jumped on. The more I started to learn about Nora and her story, I just said, if you ever need anything, feel free to reach out to me. Sarah called me and was like, we really need a film producer. Can you help us? I said, Yes, of course, I'd love to. And I kind of just dove in.
Nora really represents the types of stories that I tell as a producer, and that through line for me. So it felt like a very natural fit to jump on board with something like this. So yeah, I'm here because of Sarah—
SS: —and I'm here because of Nora.
HFJ: When was the initial idea for the documentary conceived?
SS: Jayson McNamara had been living in Argentina, and in doing the research [for his first documentary] he met Nora, and realized Nora is this incredibly compelling figure: This woman who came from a very middle class background, not politically active, who becomes this powerhouse of activism. He brought in Andrea Tortonese, who is an Argentine woman who had worked at Línea Foundadora, which is the organization the Madres founded. She’s an animator as well. Jayson and Andrea ended up co-directing the film together, and Andrea is also responsible for all of the gorgeous animation in the film.
That was in 2017, and I came on in the beginning of 2018. They were trying to get funding, and that's when I came in. But I think the source [of the documentary] is Nora herself, and the connection with her and realizing that this is a phenomenally interesting, compelling and inspirational protagonist.
HFJ: Over those five or six years of production, did the narrative arc you were trying to tell change?
MD: The narrative definitely changed. There’s so much rich history in Argentina, and when I was invited into the process, immediately I recognized how there are so many similarities between the Argentine history across Latin America, but also Nora’s story as well, and then her fight for abortion in 2017 onwards. But I kept thinking, this is an international story. It's not just an Argentine story.
And so there was this time where we were looking at an edit that we had, and we realized we needed to broaden the scope to make it even more accessible for other people, especially people who don't fully understand what happened during the ‘70s, what happened during that dictatorship, people who are not familiar with Argentine history. The challenge then became, how do we do that? So we had multiple test screenings. We ended up doing another rough edit that tried to, basically, prioritize opening up to more of an international audience.
It became something that felt accessible, something that you could understand without going too deep into the weeds, because this isn't a story about the dictatorship per se. This is a story about Nora and her history and what it meant to be a mother of a child disappeared, and then what it is like as a woman to transform yourself from being a conservative housewife into this incredible feminist activist who is globally respected and renowned, and what that path looks like, what the driving forces were for her as she continued to go through her life and navigate this extreme loss, and how she turned that into this vehicle for activism, for mobilizing her community.
HFJ: The documentary does have such a clear story arc with those two themes of the more global, universal political perspective, and then this deeply personal story of motherhood and womanhood.
Did your relationship to Nora affect the cuts you ended up making to the film?
SS: Melissa never got to meet Nora, sadly. But she had this very good industry outsider perspective, and I think that was very important.
MD: The foundational layer in any documentary is being able to build trust with your subjects. And so someone like Sarah coming in to help support this project, [she and Nora had] known each other for 30 years, and there is already some form of that trust having been built over several decades. I think for me, coming in as an outsider with a different background—I'm not an academic, I'm a journalist, I'm a filmmaker full time. And so there was a different perspective that I was able to bring in that sort of allowed a little bit of the emotionality to be removed and say, “What's the story here? What do people want to hear? What do we think is going to pull at people's heartstrings the most? What's going to resonate with the most?”
SS: Nora was able to see the final product mere weeks before she passed away, with her friends and family who'd also seen the iteration a year before. This movie has created a catharsis in the family—I think that Nora was able to say things on camera that she probably never said to her surviving son. And he came up to me [after the Argentine premiere] and said, “This is the best homage you could ever do for my mother.”
HFJ: What a testament to the film.
MD: Yeah. And we were talking about this earlier, it's a delicate balance. It's a traumatic political history for so many people, and you have to find a very smart way of telling this tragic but also hopeful story. I think as filmmakers, the one thing that you always hope is that you're able to do right by your subjects, and you have to ethically carry that and hold that very delicately. So to be able to show the film in its final stages to her and her family and have their blessing and their gratitude, that means everything.
HFJ: The film features many voices throughout, all of which are women. Was this intentional?
MD: We had other interviews that were male voices. But there’s actually no male interviews in the film now. And that was a strategic choice, because throughout history, we as a human race have had our history told to us or dictated to us by male voices. And with this we had a chance to say, this is Nora's story. This is the story of a mother. This is a story of what happened to women. This is a story of the women's movement, and this ancestral feminism that we get to look back on and be inspired by now. And so it was a choice to have women tell their stories of what it was like for them losing a child, what it was like being a survivor of a dictatorship and being able to carry that legacy forward.
HFJ: You use archival footage to great effect throughout Norita. What was the process of sourcing that footage and choosing what would work to tell the story?
MD: Jayson McNamara, our lead director, he is an archive producer by trade, and so this is very much his world. He lived in Buenos Aires for years, and was very, very familiar with the history, and has a great, strong eye for what archive is out there.
We had an immense amount of archive to sift through. It was not easy deciding what shots we wanted to include and what we wanted to set aside. There was pretty much up until the end, last minute, switch outs and change outs of shots and things. Some of the archive is clear and gorgeous and beautiful. And other archival footage is a little bit harder to watch—it’s a little shaky, it's not great quality. And those were choices that were made in order to really help push forward this sense of the time and kind of disorient you a little bit in those moments of heavy conflict during the time.
Argentina has historically been very open with their archives. But right as we were wrapping up post-production, there was a change in leadership in Argentina. [President Javier] Milei ended up stepping into office and started making threats about all the things that he was going to be doing taking on that role. And so we had a bit of a sprint at the end to make sure that we got everything that we needed before the threat of these archives and the access to all of this beautiful, incredible content that we've sourced could potentially be taken away from us. So that was sort of like an interesting parallel, if you will, in terms of us making this film. Argentina just elected someone who is kind of taking a step back.
HFJ: Is there still a national conversation or ongoing reckoning in Argentina today about what happened in the ‘70s?
SS: Milei claims that there are 8,000 or 9,000 disappeared, because that's the official [National Commission on the Disappeared] record. He doesn't say 30,000 disappeared. So it's a step back, that comment.
MD: It’s almost like the equivalent of folks that deny that the Holocaust happened. They're trying to say, well, it really wasn't that bad, and these people are being persecuted for things that happened so long ago—just let them out, it's not a big deal. And so they're really trying to normalize it and call it a “war.”
SS: That lexicon is very much of the ‘80s—the country had to frame it in some ways as a war where, clearly it was not a war. There were not equal sides. But we're walking back to the lexicon of terror that the dictatorship used in the ‘70s to clean up their mess. What’s interesting is the Atlético—which is that concentration camp we see in the film multiple times—when the dictators were leaving office, they completely bulldozed it and put a pylon in a freeway there to erase history. And I feel like that's such a metaphor for that era, but what's happening now too. And it's very upsetting as somebody who's lived there and had many experiences with these trials and truth forums. It’s sort of like a backlash against this true history.
HFJ: I know you're planning a theatrical release for those in Argentina, and it almost sounds like Norita might land like a political statement there. Was that your intention in creating this?
MD: There is no denying that this history is political in nature. I think by nature of what happened, you're seeing a military dictatorship disappear people that were our age or younger, teens, children, pregnant women that were speaking out against the government at the time. And that's terrifying to say the least. And what's really terrifying is there are so many people in the 21st century that genuinely want to silence the younger voices and want things to stay the same, where we as youth want to continue to foster change, want to continue to foster inclusivity, autonomy, all of these wonderful things that help support various communities across the globe.
This film is essentially a political statement to help uplift women and showcase the fact that there is this beautiful ancestral feminism that our generations are now continuing to be inspired by, so that we are encouraged to take up that torch and continue to march forward and speak out. And there are people that are in countries where they're not able to use their voices, but as someone who is a United States citizen and who is a Latina myself, I think it is incredibly important to use my voice and the power that I have to be telling stories like these, just to make sure that history is not erased, and that we're able to encourage younger generations and people in general to speak out and use our voices.
SS: I think by nature, Nora is a political statement. She is a political figure. She was not partisan though—her comment when Milei was elected was, “I want to get him on the phone. I want to tell him what I think.” She didn't have a problem talking to anybody about agendas of inclusivity and rights and women. It was very important to us that we show her in this context of activism, that’s a very specific kind of activism. She has not aligned herself with a politician. She is her own. It's about the people.
But you can’t not be political with Nora. So regardless of how people are going to read it, I think it is a call to arms, a call to action, an homage. But it's also inspirational. She was so inspirational to me, personally. She was this guiding light. She was a firefly.
HFJ: I think you've succeeded in creating both this inspiring feminist message, but then also a loving portrayal of Nora, too.
What is next for Norita and for you both?
MD: We're heading down to Argentina. We have our theatrical release down there on November 7. The country has been incredibly supportive and receptive. We've screened at three or four film festivals down there, won Best International Documentary at our Argentine premiere, and an honorable mention in the Human Rights category at the International Documentary festival. So we'll be releasing the film on the 7th, hopefully having a lovely run down there theatrically, and are continuing to work on distribution in terms of further streaming and other theatrical opportunities across the world.
SS: We're also in more festivals and working on that in the United States, Europe, other Latin American countries. I want to do a huge impact campaign once we have other deals inked. And I think it's really important right now, given the U.S. election.
MD: Regardless of what happens [after the election] next month, we have to continue on. We have to keep speaking up. We have to keep fighting. And I think that's the most important thing that I would want to leave everyone with from the movie.
Alix is the editor-in-chief for Hyperreal Film Journal and spends her free time watching low-budget horror movies. You can find her on Letterboxd at @alixfth and on IG at @alixfm.