Ana Cristina Benítez, the Ecuadorian based director of Mama, is inside a vehicle on his way to meet the Zapatistas in Mexico. During that journey, she narrates her struggles after her breast cancer diagnosis, receiving it during COVID’s first year.

Benitez goes back and forth from that current story to when she was much younger. When she used to videotape everything. She considered it a hobby, doing it for her father, dropping it, picking it back up to document her difficult time fighting her cancer.

As cliche as this sounds, Benitez shows her determination in her documentary Mama, and this seems like a labour of love, directing even during her multiple ‘cures’. One of these cures is what seems like a South American folk Amerindian spirituality.

Benitez also documents her support system, including her family and her boyfriend, and they help her get through the three methods of ‘curing’ cancer, including radiotherapy. All of this helps her get in touch with her body and its relationship to her surroundings.

It’s difficult to judge a documentary like Mama especially because filmmaking requires energy. There are moments where she plays around with the camera especially during exterior scenes. It’s half of the scenes indoors that require some work.

Mama, nonetheless, in an unflinching look at a woman going through these different ways to beat her cancer. There’s particularly a scene when she finishes her radiotherapy and cries with relief that it’s finally over. Benitez’ narration, though, reveals that cancer came back to other parts of her body.

Some of Mama‘s themes get more spotlight than others. Particularly, her relationship with film, why she drops the medium only to pick it back up again.  As I write these though, those thematic gaps don’t take away from the documentary’s earnestness and sincerity.