Based on a letter from activist Lili Massaferro to an American friend, narrated in voice-over, and using archival material from various Argentine media outlets, the film recounts Lili’s personal story and her political commitment, intertwined with Argentina’s own history: Peronism and the figure of Evita, the death of her son Manolo, and the Peronist feminist movement of the 1970s.
A film director returns to his childhood home to recreate, with actors, the argument that led to his parents’ separation when he was four. Through improvisation and a shoot that exposes its own artifice, he constructs memories he never had access to. But as the scene is repeated, his directions grow unstable and the line between reconstruction and desire begins to blur.
In the future, emotions and gestures have disappeared. But we are in the present: five researchers arrive on electric scooters in a village in the Basque Country, searching for what their time has forgotten. Through interviews and observation, they enter the intimacy of its inhabitants, until the boundaries between the different times begin to blur.
Karmen (83), unable to pay her electricity bill, collects wood washed ashore to heat her house, reviving a family tradition. Her friend Maixabel (77) sees her and copies the idea. When Karmen runs out of firewood, she returns to the beach only to find it empty, leaving her once again helpless against the cold. To help her, her granddaughter Oihane (16) secretly leaves bags of firewood at her front door. Meanwhile, Karmen tries to discover who is behind this kind gesture.
In a valley where cowbells ring out loudly in winter, Aiara dreams of becoming a “joaldun”. As carnival approaches and the other children get ready, her family tells her that before she can wear the cowbells, there are many things she must first understand.
Two female friends wake up in a basement. They are tied to a chair. Another friend of theirs appears and has a question to ask them… and expects an answer.
Two friends who share a house with two apartments and a well in their garden begin to trade with it. One bottles it, and the other waters a vegetable garden whose produce she sells. They build a machine around the well to exploit it increasingly better. The machine works faster and faster.
What is a personal diary?
Just Girls opens, for the first time, dozens of teenage diaries that had been sealed away forever. The film undertakes an exercise in literary rehabilitation: it rescues books that were historically neglected and reveals a common body. And so, a possible genealogy of intimate writing and its destruction emerges.
Just Girls is a cinematic cross-out. A feminist journey, from the cheesy to the political. And also, as a friend put it, ‘a film-zine made from all our diaries’.
