Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Aurora is an environmental lawyer from Bogota whose husband is murdered because of the work she does. So she flees to Toronto as a refugee. She’s later joined by her daughter Lucia. While Lucia quickly adjusts to Canadian life, things take longer for Aurora. And just when she starts to feel at home, with a steady job and a potential lover, she thinks she sees her late husband’s killer on the Subway. Will Aurora ever escape her past? And can she reconcile her new life with the one she left behind?

So Much Tenderness is a new, mature drama by Toronto’s own Colombian Canadian director Lina Rodriguez who also did the writing, production, editing and sound design.    It’s a tender and moving  experimental film about family, loss, mourning, guilt and new beginnings, as played out within the immigrant experience. This is her third feature-length drama, and her films have played at festivals including Berlin, TIFF and Locarno, with retrospectives in Spain, Argentina and Colombia. I last spoke with Lina in 2017 about her  previous film Mañana a esta hora.

I spoke with Lina in Toronto via Zoom.

So Much Tenderness opens in Toronto this weekend at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.