Clare Weiskopf’s Amazona premieres at IDFA
Val swapped family life for seclusion in the Colombian jungle. Now pregnant, her daughter, film director Clare Weiskopf confronts her with the choices she made in an attempt to heal her wounds and define motherhood before becoming a parent herself.
This is the story of Val and Clare: a mother and a daughter. After the tragic death of her eldest child, Val left her kids and family behind and escaped into the Colombian jungle. Only 11 at the time, this film’s director Clare Weiskopf couldn’t understand what her mother was looking for. Thirty years later, when she becomes pregnant, Clare decides to confront her mother, heal the wounds of the past, and try to define motherhood on her own terms. Together they go on an intimate journey exploring the boundaries between responsibility and freedom, with all the guilt and sacrifice they entail. What makes someone a good mother?
Clare Weiskopf, writer and director of the film, has been working on different social topics for more than ten years, ranging from the armed conflict in Colombia and sexual violence as a weapon of war to the spread of cumbia music in Latin America and Europe. She won the Simon Bolivar Colombian National Journalism Award twice. She has been selected for IDFAcademy and Dok.Incubator and her projects have been awarded the IDFA Bertha Fund, Tribeca Film Institute Fund and Colombian Film Fund (Proimagenes-FDC). She recently finished directing a television documentary series for RCN-TV in Colombia ‘2012: Chronicles of the End of the World’ and one for Señal Colombia ‘Los Colores del Futbol’. Clare is founding partner of casaTARAÌNTULA. As a producer she is actually producing ‘No soy yo quien grita’ by Yira Plazas O’Byrne and editing ‘Homo Botanicus’ by Guillermo Quintero.