Oscar Contender ‘Norita’ Explores Courageous Woman Who Turned Tragedy Into Triumph Over Military Dictatorship

Diminutive Norita Cortiñas stood less than 5 feet tall — about a foot shorter than Argentina’s dictator, Gen. Jorge Videla, who ruled the country from 1976-1981. But in terms of moral stature, Cortiñas towered over Videla and his blood-soaked military junta.

Nora Irma Morales de Cortiñas, or Norita as she was known, rose to prominence in Argentina under the most tragic of circumstances. In April 1977 her eldest son Gustavo disappeared, a fate that thrust him into the ranks of thousands of mostly young men and women seized by agents of the right-wing government. Many of those victims of the junta’s campaign of political intimidation and terror were never seen or heard from again. Norita, up until then a quiet housewife with no involvement in politics, joined a coterie of mothers who bravely went public with their demand that the government reveal the whereabouts of their missing children. They would stage their demonstrations at the Plaza de Mayo, outside the presidential palace in Buenos Aires.

Cortiñas’s remarkable story of courage as a leader of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement is told in the Oscar-contending documentary Norita, directed by Jayson McNamara and Andrea Carbonatto Tortonese and produced by Sarah Schoellkopf, Melissa Daniels, and Francisco Villa.

“I met her in 1995 when I was studying abroad in Bueno Aires,” Schoellkopf explained at a recent Q&A in Los Angeles. “I was able to acquire an internship with her organization, and the requirement was I go talk to one of the Madres to make sure it was okay… Norita looks at me and she’s like, ‘What do you want to do for us?’ And I said, ‘Well, I want to be an intern and I’ll make your coffee, I’ll clean toilets. I really don’t care.’ Because I knew about the Madres through my incredible Spanish classes in college and also in high school… And so that is how I met Nora.”

Schoellkopf developed a tight bond with the housewife-turned-activist and would go on to write her Ph.D dissertation on the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. She said, “Nora was kind of like my surrogate grandmother.”

Through revealing archive footage, Norita documents how the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were routinely arrested and roughed up by Argentinian security forces, many of the police mounted on horseback.

“In the plaza they would pull over a bondi, a big bus, and the police would put all the madres in this bus and take them down to the jail and book them,” Schoellkopf notes. “They could spend the night [behind bars] if they couldn’t do bail. And bail at that point was only 30 cents. So [one time] Nora says, ‘I threw down 60 cents and the police officer looked at me and said, ‘No madam, it’s 30.’ And she’s like, ‘No, that’s to cover next week!’”

Gen. Videla and his political allies tried to brand the Madres as communists and impugn them by suggesting they were at fault for raising children who became left-wing sympathizers. In a few shocking cases, Madres were abducted and disappeared themselves, including the mother of Ana María Careaga (Careaga, who appears in the film, herself was abducted, brought to a secret lair and tortured by the agents of the military regime).

“Everyone in this film has triumphed after a huge tragedy. Ana Careaga, her story deserves its own movie,” Schoellkopf said. “Her mother was disappeared after [Ana] came back from these concentration camps.”

At the Q&A, Schoellkopf shared a sinister anecdote from those times in the mid-1970s, the story of a Jewish woman who was abducted, “and how horribly Jewish people were treated within the [Argentinian] concentration camps. They used Nazi slogans, they put up swastikas, and they would tell the Jewish [prisoners], ‘We’re going to make you into soap just like in World War II.’ I mean, disgusting.”

Norita, like many mothers of missing children, always wore a photo of her son Gustavo around her neck in public. The Mothers also became known for wearing white headscarves fashioned originally from cloth diapers and stitched with the names of their disappeared sons and daughters.

“They were going to a [religious] pilgrimage outside of Buenos Aires, and they needed identifiers,” Schoellkopf says of the origins of wearing the headscarves. “So, somebody said, why don’t we wear our children’s cloth diapers? And that was like 1978… There’s so much poetry with those panuelos.”

Norita boasts an incredible array of executive producers, including Jane Fonda, Naomi Klein, Barbara Muschietti and Andy Muschietti (the sister and brother known for making the Stephen King It franchise), and two-time Oscar-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla. The Muschiettis and Santaolalla are natives of Argentina.

At a Q&A in Los Angeles in October, Santaolalla recalled his memories of the time of military dictatorship.

“Just for having long hair, you could be detained,” he said. “I’ve been in jail many times. I was lucky enough that I never got hurt, but I’ve seen people being hurt. And also by the time I was 20, I had already a hit record. Some [security agents] knew me even when they took me. They just wanted to make your life miserable or either you cut your hair or either leave the country.”

Santaolalla chose the latter option.

“I left Argentina in 1978 at the peak of military Junta and I met Norita [while] living in the United States,” the musician shared. “I was totally taken over by that energy [of the Mothers], and the fact that these women sort of transformed something that must be, I think the most horrendous pain that one can endure, into light, into really this positive energy, not resentful, but more like a loving energy.”

Santaolalla contributed music to the Norita score, along with composers Paco Cabral, Juan Luqui, and Matias Tozolla. “It felt right to make this a collective effort for the music and not just be me doing the music,” he said. “I kind of created a pattern or had a vision of more or less what the music could be and we worked around that, but with the incredible talent of everybody contributing ideas.”

An estimated 30,000 people were disappeared during the rule of Gen. Videla and his junta, but the number could be much higher.

“The bad part of it is that only perhaps 10 percent of most of the people that were detained — and they were tortured and killed — probably less than that even were perhaps involved in some political activity that would connect them with armed forces like guerrillas,” Santaolalla noted. “The rest were students or workers or teachers or Jewish, or mothers. We have to remember that they were infiltrated, the Mothers were infiltrated [by Videla spies], three mothers were killed. That’s the cruel reality.”

The composer added, “I always felt kind of in debt [to the Mothers] because I do think that they played a part also in bringing back democracy to the country.”

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’s persistence in demanding accountability from Videla and his government helped end the dictatorship; the military formally ceded power after democratic elections in 1983. In 2012, Videla was convicted of crimes associated with the disappearances (including the theft of babies stolen from mothers who were detained).

Norita, who died last year at the age of 94, would remain a force in Argentina’s life long after the dictatorship fell, building a political movement that took on many issues, including the right of women to have access to abortions. She remained non-partisan, Schoellkopf observes.

“Nora never aligned with a political party, which for me is the ethical stance of great standing,” the producer commented. “All the politicians would call her and be like, ‘Okay, Norita, stand with me on a mountain with a flag.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m not doing that. This is not my cause. My cause is truth, justice, the people.’”