Screened as part of NZIFF 2009

The Maid 2008

La nana

Directed by Sebastián Silva

The ties that bind a live-in maid to the family for whom she has worked for over 20 years are coming unstuck in this agile, funny and deeply perceptive psychological drama. Best International Feature, Sundance 2009.

Chile In Spanish with English subtitles
96 minutes 35mm

Director

Producer

Gregorio González

Screenplay

Sebastián Silva
,
Pedro Peirano

Photography

Sergio Armstrong

Editor

Danielle Fillios

Art director

Pablo González

With

Catalina Saavedra (Raquel)
,
Claudia Celedón (Pilar)
,
Mariana Loyola (Lucy)
,
Alejandro Goic (Mundo)
,
Anita Reeves (Sonia)
,
Delfina Guzmán (Abuela)
,
Andrea García-Huidobro (Camila)
,
Mercedes Villanueva (Mercedes)
,
Agustín Silva (Lucas)

Festivals

Sundance 2009

Awards

Jury Prize, Acting Award (World Cinema Drama), Sundance Film Festival 2009

Elsewhere

The ties that bind a live-in maid to the family for whom she has worked for over twenty years are coming unstuck in this agile, genre-shifting psychological drama. Catalina Saavedra is riveting as the emotionally undernourished Raquel, eager to please one moment, baleful and jealous the next. Turning 41, she wavers between the conviction that she’s a valued family member and the temptations that come her way to undermine the increasingly churlish teenage children who were once her darlings. Raquel’s passive-aggressive household subterfuges are exacerbated to blackly funny effect by her employers' insensitivity in engaging another maid to help her out. The winner of the Sundance World Cinema dramatic competition grand jury prize as well as an acting award for Saavedra, Sebastián Silva’s film provides a richly detailed, entertainingly impolite, ultimately rather sympathetic picture of Latin American privilege and its discontents. — BG