"Norrita" Producer Sarah Schoellkopf Ready For Film's SF Debut

Sarah Schoellkopf is bringing the life of Nora Cortiñas and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo movement to San Francisco’s big screen.

Spanish and cinematography have been lifelong passions for the Pasadena native, who lives in Monterey Heights and was first encouraged to pursue the language by her high school Spanish teacher, Señora Laura Pendorf. From that moment, the door to learning the culture and history of the Southern Cone opened for Schoellkopf while in college.

Through earning her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Hispanic Studies degree from Connecticut College and getting her doctoral degree in Philosophy with a focus on Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, she was able to study abroad in Argentina. She interned with the human rights group Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. All of which sparked an interest in co-producing the film “Norrita” with her production company DoctoraStories.

“This has been a long time going,” Schoellkopf said. “There were parts in this project that basically didn't look like it was gonna come to fruition for financial support, people's time, people's need to do other projects and what I think I was able to do is just kind of keep the motor running like Nora.”

The film follows human rights activist Nora Cortiñas and her journey in the 1970s to find her son Carlos Gustavo Cortiñas, who was detained and disappeared during the Argentine military dictatorship, and her eventual co-founding of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.

The documentary will make its San Francisco debut on June 1 as part of the SF IndieFest category DocFest, with a limited screening at the Roxie Theater. The film was also produced by Picabu Films and Tidetivity Studios, American actress and activist Jane Fonda, and Argentine composer and record producer Gustavo Santaolalla. 

“The story is specific and yet totally universal,” Schoellkopf said. “I mean, a mother loves her son and wants to know what happens and then in the meantime becomes a human rights icon, a feminist maverick and helps change the laws about abortion in her country. This was her journey. Because of tragedy, she created triumph.”

The Ingleside Light met with Schoellkopf to learn about producing “Norrita.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get into film? 

I've always been interested in cinema. Cinema paired well with my research topics and when I was living in Argentina in 2006-07 with a dissertation grant from UC Berkeley, I worked on two different productions. One, I was a producer, which basically meant I supported my friend's film financially and then I did subtitles for another documentary called “Madres”, so I was always interested. In fact, when I got back from that year, I told my advisor I just want to do film and she said, “You can't because you don't have a film studies degree. You're a literature and culture person, so you can have it in your dissertation, but you can't do a film studies critique.” So I loved film. I've always been involved. The pandemic helped me get more involved.

How did you get involved with “Norrita”? 

I knew Nora Cortiñas, one of the mothers of the disappeared, or Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. I knew her until her passing, almost 30 years. In 2018, she was doing a series of lectures that I had organized for her at various higher ed institutions in the South, the University of Miami, the Southern Conference of the Modern Languages Association and the University of Alabama and while she was on this trip, she mentioned they were making a documentary and I wanted to get involved because she had been not only a figure of my research but a dear and very important friend to me. I'd worked with her for so many years, so I got involved, but more as just promoting the movie for the GoFundMe campaigns or whatever it was we were using in those days. It was because of the pandemic, during lockdown, that I could finally really have a very long, fantastic, deep conversation with one of the directors. Little by little, poco a poco, I got more and more involved. In 2022, I made a life pivot and went from teaching to teaching in a different way with my production shingle, Doctora Stories, which I basically started to support this movie, but I'm doing other things too. Now, I'm a producer on this movie, and it's just thrilling because it's a beautiful, beautiful piece. It's really an important subject. She's an incredible, captivating, inspiring woman.

What was it like to produce this film?

It was kind of weird. Some days were super mellow, just responding to emails or maybe having phone calls or trying to figure out financing. The beauty of this, I feel like, is that I work from home now. I don't commute. I'm not commuting to school. I can do a lot of it online with Zoom meetings, thank God. It has allowed me to be present for my family in a different way, and I can work from home. But then you'd have these days that were crazy busy, like lots of things ticking off your agenda list and emails and follow-ups. If we're on the festival circuit, you fly somewhere, you get to do all these events and interviews. I actually love all that, but there's a lot of time away. In two years, from April to October, I went back. I went back in September last year and I went back in November when we opened theatrically in Argentina. All those trips are significant,  and if I were single and had no children, it would be fabulous, but it's a balancing act.

Why is a film like this so important today? 

It's pretty simple. It's about a system that slowly takes over a democracy. It’s about a dictatorship that becomes cruel and lethal against its own population. It's about a group of average citizens who stood up and said no and didn't do it with bombs or guns. They did it with peaceful protest, with smart connection building and savvy. None of these women were in the professional realm in this space. Some of them were actual professionals. Most of them were housewives in the 70s. It's not like they were some political masterminds. There were a few with political experience. Three Madres were disappeared by the government, and one of them is a Paraguayan woman who had come with political experience, but it's not like these are bigwigs in the scene.

To me, it's beautiful art, incredible music, amazing cinematography, really beautifully edited but you also have this sense that if people don't pay attention things, the rolling out of dictatorship, authoritarianism, lack of rights, lack of due process, all of these things start happening and unless there is a groundswell or  it's like Tiananmen Square with the one man in front of the tank, who we still, I don't know if anybody knows that man's name, right? And he may have been killed, right? But it's these important images and these important movements and Madres, you can still go to Buenos Aires on Thursday at 3:30 in the afternoon and they are still circling the plaza and it may be in a wheelchair and it may be only two or three of them because they're in their 90s but they're still there. It's unbelievable. It's one of the longest, longest human rights groups of that nature in Latin America. It's really amazing.