Producciones Arte Nuevo

Two Mexican Jewish girls of come of age in Mexico City during the 1960s

In Guita Schyfter’s El águila y el gusano, an intricate plot serves to intersect the destinies of several characters: the owner of a beauty salon in love with “all things Chinese”, a politician with a taste for oration who couldn’t care less about the problems of his country, a political adviser whose counsel is never considered and a shady investigator with a name that nobody seems to recall. The script by Schyfter and Hugo Hiriart, her longtime collaborator and author of the 2013 novel on which the film is based, bristles with finely-crafted, hilarious dialogue.

In 1956, while living in Chiapas, Mexico, U.S. anthropologist Roberta Montague adopts a baby girl, and asks her colleague, famous Cuban ethnologist Calixta Guiteras, to be the girl’s godmother. Inspired by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Calixta decides to return to her native island. Parallel to Maite's search, film director Guita Schyfter, born in Costa Rica to European Jewish immigrants, shares with us her own personal story.