How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in the Dramatic Competition.
My film is a love letter to the place where my grandmother resides, a small dusty border town called Somerton, Arizona.
The film was conceived one winter when I asked my grandmother what she wanted for Christmas. She took me by surprise by saying a car. My mind began to race. What would a 70-year-old-woman, who had never driven before in her entire life, do with a car and what troubles could she get into From there, the writing began.
With this film I wish to explore the different issues facing women or girls (as the title refers to them) as they discover their sexuality. In the film, three generations of women all search for love and sex one long hot summer.
There is the teenage daughter who is just discovering what sex is all about and is determined to become a woman, her middle-aged mother who is sexually frustrated and lonely, and the matriarch of the family who, at seventy, has never really experienced true love or sexual fulfillment. What we see is that while these women are divided by generations, they are each experiencing the same emotions and feelings as they discover their sexuality. Which poses the question, At what age does a girl stop being a girl and start being a woman
Georgina Garcia Riedel
