Juntas

Norma and Cachita, the first lesbian couple to marry in South America, decide to go back to Colombia, where they first met. Their filmed journey eases swerves bordering on fantasy, given that their 20-year-old memories are being embellished as they delicately fade away.

Norma and Cachita, the first lesbian couple to marry in South America when they were already 68, decide to go back to Colombia where they first met. It is no coincidence that those filming these two women, who for many years fought in support of Argentine’s law on same-sex marriage, are a couple of women. But Juntas does not “treat” a subject; it sets aside the historical story of a struggle to try and recreate the vital impetus needed to drive it. The filmmakers, already friends of the sexagenarians before the shoot, are sensitive to the emotional texture of the women’s journey in the country they had left twenty years earlier: the emotional reunion with a neighbour, the melancholy silence that follows the reading of a terse newspaper article on their story. “This house could have been the house of a lifetime…”, remarks Cachita, who later confides that she has never seen Norma happier than in Colombia. Have the two women returned here to find their romantic past? Are their reasons not inevitably different? The journey, enriched by song and dance, eases swerves bordering on fantasy, since their 20-year-old memories, embellished but patchy, seem to be delicately fading away.