Motriz

An intimate and delicate portrait of a 50-year-old Cuban electrician named Maria. She had to make a quick career choice as a student, she says, and somehow she never moved on, so this is how she makes a living. In her cramped shop she repairs household electrical appliances and chats to her customers and neighbors. From these conversations, we learn that an old blender is better than a new one and a repair will keep a machine going for years at a fraction of the cost of replacing it. She also explains that the motor is the heart of an appliance, and repairing it is like a sort of heart operation. Maria’s life hasn’t always gone smoothly: her ex lives in the house she paid for; behind the spare parts in the workshop, we see her bed. Sometimes she climbs on the roof, looks up at the clouds and thinks about her granddaughter. There she feels better and can breathe more easily.