Everyone has a grandmother or grandfather in their hearts, just as everyone has a family, the source of emotions that truly leave their mark and, therefore, the scene of conflicts and rifts of varying degrees of depth.
Thus, twins Mafalda and Diego, after a long time without contact with their grandmother Pilar, are surprised when her executor calls them to deliver their inheritance, a country house in Portugal and some money, but with a shocking condition: they must use the money to free themselves from work and so have time to create a story that perpetuates the family memory, since Mafalda, like her grandmother, has always been a great storyteller – a theme with a long tradition: women as carriers of memory.
A sibling relationship unlike any other in the history of cinema
Mafalda goes one step further and decides to make the story into a film. However, to carry out this plan, the siblings will have to rethink their lives, with the help of Mafalda’s partner, Ricardo, while they struggle, in Galicia and Portugal, to overcome the enormous obstacles that film production entails for outsiders like them.
For Mafalda and Diego, in their attempt to remain faithful to Pilar’s wishes, it is not just a matter of healing the wound left by the family breakdown following the accidental death of their father; it is, above all, about rediscovering their grandmother’s lost memories, now recovered through Domingos Martins (a friend of Pilar’s who was secretly in love with her), and, in the end, giving her the only permanence possible, bringing her into the lives of Mafalda and Diego.
This film is about the many paths of love: the love of those who came before us and gave us life, the love of siblings, the love of lovers, and how all of them, through the family, form the basis and foundation of any community. Hence the significance their grandmother’s house acquires for them, to the point of putting down roots there and making it their own, as Pilar wished.
Love, identity, memory
In addition to being an ode to family, Others will love what I loved is an ode to Portugal and Galicia, because our characters’ odyssey raises questions of identity, both individual and collective, and of memory, both personal and social. The English title of the film expresses this well: loving what our ancestors have passed on to us, a home, a land with enormous appeal, a language (the Galician language, which is trying to survive its centuries-old marginalisation) and also the charm of the small differences that enrich our identity, such as, in this case, the relationship between Portugal and Galicia.
A lively and luminous narrative
To bring this dramatic comedy to life, it was essential to have a cast capable of turning the characters into living beings and Raúl Veiga’s main mission was to direct them in such a way that the film would move the audience. We had a group of excellent Portuguese and Galician actors: Francisca Sobrinho (“Mafalda”), Tiago Araújo (“Diego”) and Xosé Barato (“Ricardo”), to name just the protagonists. On the technical team, we must highlight the names of the director’s regular collaborators, Juan Carlos Gómez (more than a hundred credits on IMDB) in cinematography and Guillermo Represa (also a lot of credits on IMDB) in editing, with a special mention for Paulo Pires’ music.
The colour palette of the locations (creation of Jorge Lourenço) and costumes (by Ana Isabel Nogueira) intensely convey the presence of autumn and the beautiful Ponte de Lima, and, in general, the landscape of the Miño region is the backdrop against which Mafalda, Diego and Ricardo, under the benevolent gaze of Domingos Martins, try to find the path to their freedom, in a lively and luminous narrative that leads to a surprising ending.
