James Y. Lee
Gabriela Diaz Arp’s Matininó, playing as part of the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival, serves as a reminder that there’s something to be said about documentary films that try to transcend the realities that individuals face. Even more, then, is to be said about how they blur lines of fiction and nonfiction in the process. Joshua Oppenheimer’s landmark 2012 film, The Act of Killing, demonstrated the power of film by forcing genocidaire Anwar Congo to directly confront the weight and terror of his crimes via a process of cinematic reenactment. Robert Greene’s Procession from 2021 showed six men who suffered sexual abuse as children at the hands of the Catholic Church, creating films as a means of drama therapy. These are deeply revelatory examples of transformation occurring right in front of a documentarian’s cameras, offered to their subjects to create something of significance, and awakening something within them through their individual artistic processes.
For a time, Matininó holds similar promises of its own. The Villanueva-Rodriguez family is made up of several multigenerational women who have escaped the grasp of histories of domestic abuse. Led by their matriarch, Idaliz, who departed her husband after suffering utterly terrible violence at his hands, the Villanuevas have found themselves grappling with the aftershocks of what emerged; troubled bonds with each other, inherited pain and traumas, and some kind of resilient hope for a better future.
Where Diaz Arp’s film comes in is an invitation for Idaliz, her daughters, and her granddaughters to find a folkloric, mystical means of presenting their growth and healing via filmmaking. Indeed, the opening image of Matininó is not a straightforward introduction to the family via talking-head interviews—that comes later. For now, we pay witness to women in masks, adorning white robes, flowing in the woods, and lit by flame as they declare the stories that are about to be told and the fear that the Villanueva women will transcend. As we move through the generations over the course of Diaz Arp’s film, these women find personas to represent their continuing fight against patriarchal oppression. In the process, they seek out creatures and entities from myths of yore to represent the fears they have to conquer, and the transcendence they strive for.
For much of Matininó‘s duration, the film is broadly more interested in various means of recounting these histories rather than specific modes of transformation. The greatest point of fascination within the film is firmly planted within the cinematic vignettes that the Villanuevas construct, fantastical by nature. representative and symbolic within every gesture. Nature holds a great amount of power within this family, allowing them to channel it as warriors—while the men who hold dominion over them are gas-mask donning assailants, garbed in man-made creation.
There’s a power in the catharsis that this exercise offers to the members of this family—these vignettes become a gateway for them to speak among themselves about the reverberations of this abuse. Daughters seek out solace from their mothers while fully acknowledging the pain they experience. Questions of atonement and forgiveness emerge within the scope of the narratives they construct. Each member of the family gets to create a heroic persona of real significance to the inner strength they both know they possess and want to aspire to going forward. The folkloric facets of the stories they tell ground them in the worlds they want to exist in; a reminder of the place that they come from, and their aspiration towards Matininó as a space of solace and security for them.
All of these details, while potent, are part of a general imbalance in terms of formal execution that doesn’t entirely mar the experience of the film. The strength of these vignettes—and the place of conquering fear that they eventually reach— is notable enough to carry the film’s emotional momentum. But with a runtime of just under 90 minutes, the film feels like it scrapes the outermost layers of the rich histories behind this family and their road towards recovery. We understand what their journeys through recovery and empowerment look like, and the image that they want to present for what it manifests as. But are there opportunities for us to observe them for who they are beyond the scope of the recovery they hope to reach? Would we understand then the things they lost, the things they’re trying to regain, and why this specific mode of drama therapy is so important?
Matininó feels relatively self-contained in its portrayal of recovery as a result; not entirely transformative in its portrayal of these women’s recoveries and evolution, but still striking in the limited frame it provides. As the world they create grows larger, and as they find opportunities to work with each other in this fictionalized space for cooperation, cultural expression, and difficult decisions, Diaz Arp gets to the heart of why this specific kind of artistic processing might be so potent. Imagination becomes not just a way for these women to escape, but also to seek out and actively create a better world, safely in a space where they can risk and dream.
Yet brevity only accomplishes so much in conveying what this art is working towards. This is a family one can spend so much time with—so many generations spanned, so many different stories of inheritance and growth. Here, it is powerful enough to see the world they dream of, the culture they imagine for themselves, the sacrifices they’ve made to find safety. It is another kind of power to potentially observe the material world they live in, here and now, around us all, and see in even further detail how that can grow and change to their powerful will, too.
