{"id":310135,"date":"2025-11-27T11:30:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T11:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/310135\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T11:30:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T11:30:11","slug":"its-andy-and-barbara-muschietti-explore-real-horrors-in-norita","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/310135\/","title":{"rendered":"‘It’s’ Andy and Barbara Muschietti Explore Real Horrors in ‘Norita’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAndy and Barbara Muschietti<\/a> are best known as the brother-sister director-producer duo behind the \u201cIt\u201d films and the HBO prequel series, \u201cIt: Welcome to Derry<\/a>.\u201d But this year, they executive produced an entirely new project about real-world horrors and disappearances that took place in their home country of Argentina.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNorita\u201d is a documentary directed by Jayson McNamara and Andrea Carbonatto Tortonese. It tells the story of Nora \u201cNorita\u201d Cortinas, the mother of an Argentinian activist who disappeared during the country\u2019s 1970s junta dictatorship. Cortinas\u2019 efforts for the government to reveal the truth about her son\u2019s whereabouts sparked the Madres de Plaza de Mayo movement, where the mothers of revolutionaries protested and pressured the despotic government for information about their missing children.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Muschiettis joined the project after watching McNamara\u2019s prior documentary, \u201cMessenger on a White Horse,\u201d which explored English-Argentinian journalist Robert Cox\u2019s bold efforts to cover the Madres de Plaza de Mayo during the dictatorship. <\/p>\n

\n\tAndy and Barbara grew up during Argentina\u2019s dictatorial regime, so the topic struck a personal nerve with them. \u201cWe are Argentinian. We spent our childhoods in Argentina during the dictatorship. I was five years old when the military took hold of the country, and I was 13 when democracy came back,\u201d Barbara told Variety.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to the Muschiettis, Jane Fonda<\/a> also joined \u201cNorita\u201d as an executive producer. \u201cJane Fonda got involved at the same time I did, and my God, I thought I knew everything, but then I met this woman. I\u2019ve never met anybody like her. She is such a powerhouse and relentless,\u201d continued Barbara. \u201cWe did a screening at the Museum of Tolerance a month ago, and she came and presented it and her speech moved me to tears. She understands that this movie is about Norita, but it\u2019s also about what the U.S. is living with right now. She understands that there\u2019s a comfort in being American that allows people to think that things like what happened in the film will never happen here, but that\u2019s not reality. The reality is that it can happen and people have to start paying attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe documentary\u2019s timeliness for America and for any place enduring a tumultuous political climate is self-evident. What is more nuanced, however, is how the doc fits in with the Muschiettis\u2019 larger filmography. While the filmmakers are Argentinian, their most well-known works are Stephen King adaptations about kids fighting off a killer clown demon in Maine. On the surface, it\u2019s a long way off from Buenos Aires.<\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, there are overlapping themes between the projects. \u201cNorita,\u201d in many ways, explores the real-world manifestations of the horrors \u201cIt\u201d alludes to. In \u201cIt\u201d\u2018s setting of Derry, Maine, people go missing at troubling rates, yet people remain complicit out of fear. While the culprit in the fictional town may be a paranormal entity embodied by Pennywise the Clown, he is but a symbol of American colonization, racism, trauma and exclusion, as brought to the surface in the many power struggles depicted in \u201cIt: Welcome to Derry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAndy and I read the book when we were, I believe, 14 and 15. It was two years after the end of the junta and the return of Democracy,\u201d recalled Barbara. \u201cAnd we fell into that book like we\u2019d never fell into anything before. It was just crazy and a big part of it was that it was about the weaponization of fear, which is what Pennywise does so well. Of course, that felt very familiar to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNorita\u201d had its world premiere at the Dances With Films Film Festival in Los Angeles in June and has since played at over a dozen festivals around the world. It is currently campaigning for awards consideration. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andy and Barbara Muschietti are best known as the brother-sister director-producer duo behind the \u201cIt\u201d films and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[104642,112087,49,48,75,22149,79304,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-310135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-andy-muschietti","9":"tag-barbara-muschietti","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-it-welcome-to-derry","14":"tag-jane-fonda","15":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}