A sociologist whose mother is from Spain and whose father is from Nicaragua, Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez is a documentary film director with a distinguishable commitment to social issues. Her first full-length documentary, The Passion of María Elena (2003), shows the experiences of a young Rarámuri woman searching for justice after the tragic death of her three-year-old son. The film won the award for Best Documentary at the São Paulo International Film Festival and was nominated for the Ariel Award for Best Full-Length Documentary.

Her following documentary film, The Immortal (2005), offers a portrayal of postwar Nicaragua centered on a family from the town of Waslala and the scars that remain twenty years after the armed conflict. The Mermaid and the Diver (2009), which won the award for Best Documentary by a Woman in the Morelia International Film Festival, explores the worldview of the indigenous Miskito people of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. With Magic Words (2012), the director returns once again to Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution in a documentary—presented in first person—that weaves the director’s own memories with archival materials, drawing surprising connections between the country’s history and contemporary reality. Her most recent release, My Beloved Spain (2015), explores with irony the present-day reality of her mother’s country of origin.

Regarding the revolution’s privileged role in her work, Moncada Rodríguez comments:

I don’t address the revolution because it is attractive or striking. I address the revolution because it was the process that has most impacted my life and the lives of many people in Nicaragua. … What we don’t speak about gets forgotten, what we don’t record gets forgotten, and those who record history and have control over images also control in some way history itself, which is considerably manipulative. Thus, what I propose to do in my work is precisely to recover this memory. (Canal 2; my translation)

Vera R. Coleman

Arizona State University