Santitos

Santitos is an imaginative mixture of comedy, magic realism and romance, in which the earthy enters into a whimsical confrontation with the mystical. Motive for the spiritual and passionate odyssey by the young widow Esperanza Diaz is a tragic one: the death of her only daughter. When she doesn’t get to see the body, Esperanza refuses to believe she is really dead. In a culture shaped by tele-novellas, melodrama and an unshakable faith in religion, her sorrow makes way for superstition. She waits for a sign that enables her to put aside the terrible reality. Her prayers are answered when a popular local saint appears behind the glass of her oven. Following his cryptic instructions Esperanza decides to go looking for her daughter. With nothing in her baggage except hope and a stock of ceramic statues of saints, she leaves the safety of the countryside for Tijuana, a journey that leads her to the wrong side of the tracks. The bizarre adventures she has there will change her faith and fate for ever. The innocent, God-fearing creature of yore has become an independent and sexually-aware woman. She goes looking for her daughter but finds herself. Santitos is a soap-opera of biblical proportions, a mild parody on dramatic excess and naïve superstition in Latin-American culture.