Film Description

This short film takes us far from the noise and bustle of Havana, to a palm-lined valley in the remote Cuban countryside. There, four elderly sisters live together in the humble tin-roofed cabin where they were born. Although it lacks electricity and running water, the cabin is in perfect order, and smoking cigarettes on the porch and listening to the transistor radio before bed are diversion enough for the industrious sisters. The film depicts these strong and self-sufficient women at work planting seeds, grinding flour, roasting coffee, and washing clothes in the river as they recall the stories that brought them to live together on the family farm.

Hard-working Dolores, feisty Gelacia, sad-eyed Cira, and pensive Josefa grew up minding their strict parents. After their parents died, each one left the farm at some time, in ill-fated relationships with men, but ultimately decided that men were more trouble than they were worth, and so they have chosen to live the farmer's humble life of hard work and orderliness in the family cabin. The film offers the stories of the sisters, laconic, unassuming, and always at work, as a testament to the strength and self-reliance of women to make a life for themselves from the bounty of nature and their own sweat.