La Once
overview
For sixty years, Maria Teresa and her high school friends have been meeting for monthly tea in Santiago. As a maid quietly keeps cups and plates filled, the genteel women pray, then talk about their ailments, their husbands, and the rapidly changing world around them. Director Maite Alberdi keeps a tight focus on the food and the friends' faces, as they listen to each other's stories, gently tease, and reminisce. Gradually their personalities emerge, and over four years of filming, we come to know them individually, understanding their differences and senses of humour. As their number dwindles, their friendship group takes on even more significance. A deceptively simple construct, Tea Time in fact works on several levels, not least as a journey into the little seen world of upper middle class Chile, and, most memorably, as a moving love letter to female friendship.