Coming to PBS’s POV tonight, Monday, July 27: TEA TIME
Maite Alberdi’s loving look at a group of longtime friends debuted at SANFIC last year. It went on to screen at IDFA, True/False, Miami, Ambulante, BAFICI, Doc Aviv, Seattle, Sydney, and Sheffield, among others.
Since they graduated from high school, a close group of Chilean women have hosted a small tea party once a month – for the past sixty years. One of these women is Maria Theresa, Alberdi’s grandmother, and the film’s primary guide to the proceedings. These lively meetings have sustained them through radical changes to their nation and to more personal changes to their lives, from marriages and divorces, to births and deaths, with seemingly the only constant being the enduring friendship and love between this tight circle. Shot over the course of several years which saw their own measure of change, as the friends have to confront sickness and aging among their own group, Alberdi’s film offers the viewer a place at the table to listen in to the gossip, recognize each woman’s quirks, and to be charmed by them all while witnessing the elaborate pastry spreads they’ve painstakingly organized.
what (not) to doc 