Tránsitos
2008 · 13m · España
Directed by Susana Casares
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A video document on the preparation of immigrant women in Spain to care for older people, portraying the learning through testimonies, both of the teachers and the students, about their past and present as carers. Most of these women come from Latin America; they arrive in Spain with the purpose of helping their families economically, while finding it difficult to combine household work, dreams, longings and the extreme need to speak by phone with their children.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a straightforward advocacy doc, but Casares refuses the easy emotional hit — instead she builds a formal architecture out of testimony and silence that makes the politics legible without spelling it out. It's subversive precisely because it doesn't feel subversive.
Tránsitos positions itself deliberately within the essay-film tradition, using fragmented testimony and careful montage to construct an argument about labor, displacement, and care that unfolds through form rather than narration — the kind of considered structural work that rewards repeated viewing.
The film's entire weight rests on the decision to intercut the women's own words about their training with their private confessions about their children — that single structural choice transforms what could've been instructional material into something that holds genuine contradictions without resolving them.