Andy and Barbara Muschietti are best known as the brother-sister director-producer duo behind the “It” films and the HBO prequel series, “It: Welcome to Derry.” 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.
“Norita” is a documentary directed by Jayson McNamara and Andrea Carbonatto Tortonese. It tells the story of Nora “Norita” Cortinas, the mother of an Argentinian activist who disappeared during the country’s 1970s junta dictatorship. Cortinas’ efforts for the government to reveal the truth about her son’s 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.
The Muschiettis joined the project after watching McNamara’s prior documentary, “Messenger on a White Horse,” which explored English-Argentinian journalist Robert Cox’s bold efforts to cover the Madres de Plaza de Mayo during the dictatorship.
Andy and Barbara grew up during Argentina’s dictatorial regime, so the topic struck a personal nerve with them. “We 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,” Barbara told Variety.
In addition to the Muschiettis, Jane Fonda also joined “Norita” as an executive producer. “Jane Fonda got involved at the same time I did, and my God, I thought I knew everything, but then I met this woman. I’ve never met anybody like her. She is such a powerhouse and relentless,” continued Barbara. “We 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’s also about what the U.S. is living with right now. She understands that there’s a comfort in being American that allows people to think that things like what happened in the film will never happen here, but that’s not reality. The reality is that it can happen and people have to start paying attention.”
The documentary’s 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’ 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’s a long way off from Buenos Aires.
However, there are overlapping themes between the projects. “Norita,” in many ways, explores the real-world manifestations of the horrors “It” alludes to. In “It”‘s 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 “It: Welcome to Derry.”
“Andy 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,” recalled Barbara. “And we fell into that book like we’d 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.”
“Norita” 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.