NO BRIEF CANDLE ~ Anita's Story

We follow Anita, our Latina maven of the spoken and written word, as she works to sculpt new plays, poems, and prose.  At age 90 she performs in an Off-Broadway play directed by her granddaughter, an accomplished actress and director herself. 

Other family members have inherited Anita's love of the arts and considerable talent: a published poet, a broadcast journalist, a musician, and a singer. "I think creativity is expressing the world in myself," Anita says, "because I'm the one that's looking at the world with all my knowledge, my experience, and my culture...and I see differently than other people, so I have to make that my own."

Anita's cultural heritage and close association with the Latino community in New York City figure prominently in the film. We witness her ambitious collaboration with a professional conductor to write and produce a Puerto-Rican themed opera, and join her as she speaks at the United Nations on behalf of her birthplace. We dive into the Puerto Rican Day Parade as it salsas its way up Fifth Avenue, and take a poignant trip back to Anita's childhood home in Puerto Rico.

The film will briefly trace her early years of privilege in Vieques, PR, her solo boat trip as she immigrates to New York at age 11, and her family's lean years in New York's barrio. Anita tells us how she learned to dance from watching movies, and in what would be an extraordinary chain of happy accidents, landed a job in a Broadway Show.  A singer. A dancer. An actress. Shot out of a cannon in Ringling Brothers Circus (yes, really). A political advocate. A wife, times four. A mother, times two.

In the course of the film, Anita suffers a painful fall that leaves her facing life changes and long-held fears about mobility and dependence, but we also recognize her endearing and enduring ability to live in the moment and adapt to change.