To be or not to be a mother, being a mother is many things in Latido

Two women experience motherhood from totally different points of view. One of them wants to become a mother as an adult and undergoes medical processes to achieve this. The other is a teenager and dancer, with a promising future, who experiences an unwanted pregnancy.

Their meeting contrasts them, but also begins to unite them when they discover that what each one needs lives in the other. This is the premise of Beatthe film written and directed by Katina Medina Mora, starring Marina de Tavira and Camila Calónico, which is available today on Prime Video.

In an interview, Marina de Tavira detailed how this story emerged, which addresses different visions of motherhood.

“It is a project that I am very grateful for, because Katina thought about it, from the beginning, to do with me. She and I met in the pilot of a series and from that moment on we wanted to work together. She told me, ‘one day I’m going to write a script for you and it comes from a very personal place.’

“Katina was, at that moment, reflecting on whether she was going to be a mother or not. She was reaching an age where she already had to make that decision and she entered into a strong personal process about it. In the end she decided ‘I’m not going to be a mother, but I’m going to write this script, because I think that motherhood has multiple forms, that there is not just one way to see it.’

“We are used, especially now that it is May 10, to bringing flowers to the holy and dear mom, but being a mother is many things and she decided to write about two characters who are experiencing motherhood from totally different places,” she told Excelsior.

The film is an emotional journey of both protagonists. Leonor (Marina de Tavira) cannot get pregnant and undergoes very aggressive treatments, which is why she even has a relationship breakup. While Emilia (Camila Calónico), who lives with her grandmother, faces an unwanted pregnancy.

“Motherhood can be unwanted pregnancy, the inability to get pregnant, the adoption process, postpartum depression; It may be the joy that, without a doubt, it is; It can be many things and that’s what we want to talk about,” she said.

The Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress for the film Roma, detailed how Beat It also addresses the absence of the mother and what such emptiness weighs on both characters.

“Motherhood is also being daughters or sons. In this film they are at a point of total disagreement, in regards to their own motherhood, but in their situation of being daughters, the two, in one way or another, have experienced abandonment: Leonor due to the early death of her mother and Emilia because of the mother’s abandonment, although she has the figure of the grandmother, played by Teresa Sánchez, who is an incredible actress. The film also talks about being grandmothers who end up being mothers, due to the absence of the mother who gave birth to them,” she said.

De Tavira discovered, through this story, part of the medical treatments that many women who want and have not been able to become mothers go through.

“They were unknown to me, as they are to many people. I am grateful that Katina has opened this horizon for me. It is a very aggressive process for the body, very hard on the mental health of women and couples.

“I documented myself with a book that Isabel Zapata wrote about it called In Vitro, who, in the form of a diary, narrates what she herself experienced as a writer and that it was a success story. Not in Leonor’s case, as it has been for many women, and there is a moment in which she has to say ‘now, I have to stop, not anymore!’.

“So they look for another way, which is adoption, which is another form of motherhood. It was very important for me to know what happens hormonally and psychologically when you enter a process like this,” she said.

And it is that Beat It also addresses the search for motherhood through adoption, which also has greater complications if it is a woman who does not have a partner.

“There is also a stigma and social judgment there. Because if you are married the process is easier than if you are a single woman who wants to be a mother, there being so many girls and boys who need a home. I understand that the process is meticulous and delicate and that (the adopting family) has to be investigated, but that the stigma of being a single woman seems tremendous to me,” she said.

Beat It also addresses the clandestine search for the termination of a teenager’s pregnancy and the danger to which she is exposed.

“For Katina, this topic was very important. When we filmed the film, abortion was not legal and for her it was very important to show that Emilia cannot terminate her pregnancy because the weeks in which she could have done it have already passed, because she lives in a state in which she was not decriminalized.

“His situation could have been different, if he had had that option from the beginning. “They should have the option of being able to interrupt it, with all the health and medical conditions that guarantee their safety,” he said.

Marina and Camila had already worked together, just in the series pilot they did with Medina Mora.

“We already had a bond and it is very nice, because the twist that Katina makes is that Leonor finds another way to be a mother and perhaps, Emilia, another way to be a daughter, so it helped us to have worked before,” she concluded.

Of her own motherhood

“Nothing has been a bigger challenge for me than being a mother and it is an everyday challenge,” said Marina de Tavira about her own motherhood of her only son, Tadeo, now a teenager.

“I have to have imagination every day and at each stage and each age of my son, in a different way, to find links and see how I am going to communicate now; the balance between discipline and affection. It is an everyday job, tremendously hard, joyful and, although it may seem cliché, it is the most immense love I have ever felt, but it is also the most difficult thing that has happened to me,” he shared with Excélsior.

That is why he stated that it must be a collaborative work.

“(Motherhood) has to be shared, there has to be that awareness. It is not that in my case it is not shared, but most women do not share it equally, it is the truth,” she explained.