A Time of Love and War 2000
Distributed by Filmakers Library, 124 East 40th Street, New York, NY 10016; 202-808-4980
A film by Sabrina Mathews, produced by Productions Multi-Monde
Director n/a
VHS, color, 50 min.
Adult
Film Studies, Multicultural Studies
Date Entered: 11/09/2018
Reviewed by Oksana Dykyj, Head, Visual Media Resources, Concordia University, MontrealSabrina Mathews journeyed from Canada to Nicaragua to paint murals and to show support for the Sandinista cause. There she met Martha Aguilar a young woman excited by the possibilities of positive revolution. The friendship grew, and although they had known each other for only two weeks, their subsequent 11-year friendship was sustained by correspondence, taking Martha from Nicaragua to the Ukraine and back. Through dramatizations, archival footage and the reading of their letters (Martha’s translated into English and read by someone else), a personal, political view of history experienced by the two women unfolds.
When Martha receives a bursary to study pharmacology in the Ukraine, the closest she will get to studying medicine, she accepts. She discovers that she is pregnant and must put her daughter in a Ukrainian orphanage until Sabrina comes to her rescue by mailing her American dollars for daycare hidden in each of her letters. Meanwhile, Sabrina works in an art gallery and paints politically motivated murals.
The power of their friendship spans cultures but is rooted in their political beliefs about the overbearing control that the United States has on Canadian economy and on the politics of Nicaragua in terms of the U.S. anti-Sandinista support. Both share disappointment when their respective countries’ politics become more right-wing dominant.
The patchwork of the correspondence blends their personal lives with major historical developments like the fall of the Soviet Union and hardships of the beginnings of Ukrainian independence. After Martha returns to Nicaragua with her daughter, the two women reunite and celebrate their friendship and ideologies.
A Time of Love and War seamlessly travels between the political and the historical while saying firmly grounded in the biographical. Excerpts of the correspondence between Martha Aguilar and Sabrina Mathews are located on the Canadian distributor’s website at: http://www.cinemalibre.com/atolaw/atolawe.htm Recommended for such academic areas as Film Studies and Cultural Studies.
Recommended