SECTIONS // OFFICIAL COMPETITION FEATURE LENGTH

La once (Tea Time)

Maite Alberdi
70' / 2014 / Chile
Web: teatimethemovie.com
Spanish
English subtitled

Audience vote 8.21

Five older ladies have had tea together every month for the past 60 years, ever since they finished highschool. Although their personalities are very diverse, they have been together so long they can forgive one another anything. Together, they reminisce about the old days and reflect on more current affairs. Laughing, they read aloud from a house keeping book, concluding that things haven’t changed that much in terms of male-female relations. Although that twerking they saw on TV recently was really something new. Their stories are many and varied, their opinions forthright. One lady has no problem at telling another that her husband was as ugly as sin. Sixty years become sixty-one, sixty-two, even sixty-four. And every month the cookies are laid out, whipped cream is put onto the pastries, the tea infusers bobbing in the teapot. The ladies always appear in immaculate makeup and clo thing at their meetings, which are sometimes hilarious, but always warm and full of love. Tea time never starts without a brief prayer and an expression of their realization that they have a lot to bethankful for. A meditation on youth, age and friendship, and about the things that pass: “Have you noticed our group is shrinking a bit?”

Main Festivals & Awards

Best director& Best Film @ SANFIC / EDA Award for Best Female-DirectedDocumentary@ IDFA / Best Documentary@ Guadalajara Film Festival / Knight DocumentaryAchivementAward @ Miami Int'l Film Festival / Best Documentary@Festival Internatiocal de Cine de Cartagena de Indias FICCI

Director's Biography

Maite Alberdi (1983) studied Film and Aesthetics at Universidad Católica de Chile. As a director, she has developed a highly particular style that achieves an intimate portrayal of the characters she works with, through everyday stories in small-scale worlds. She works teaching at several universities, and is co-writer of the book: Teorías del cine documental en Chile: 1957-1973. (Documentary Film Theories in Chile: 1957-1973).