"Most literature and films are polysemic, have several possible readings.

I have experienced Elena from both a historic and a narrative perspective. The visual documentary illusion is just the form, the appearance of what I find to be a quest for identity and inner meaning. The life of the narrator is just a diving board from which Petra takes a leap to reveal the search for Elena as she twists and turns in the air and plunges into the waters of being a woman in the twenty-first century.

Latin American cinema has been historically, with rare exceptions, too heavily loaded on the expression of outward reality; on too much social realism, folklore and crude surfaces. Pretending to reveal our predicament in the sound and fury of our aspirations and social behavior. In Brazil from the films of Glauber Rocha to City of God. Even my close friend Titón couldn’t avoid a Cuban tragicomic journey in Guantanamera. They might be classic films but create a lopsided vision of our continent.

Petra Costa has turned away from the sound and fury, turned inward to explore our subjectivity, delved into the waters of our consciousness, on our need for an individual, personal identity. Elena emerges from the womb of her socially committed parents. She even uses documentary footage to state her origins and then turns away from the collective to explore the individual. The rest of the film is a desperate need for the expression of the self. We suffer from too much Don Quixote in his absolute certainty, and too little from the doubts and ambiguity of Hamlet. Elena is a film that attempts to restore the much needed balance in Latin America between the outward expression and the inward quest.

Now I will explore why I see Elena beyond history and an integral expression of a dangerous Western myth: Narcissus. In her quest she is only able to see herself and rejects most attempts by the other to claim her love. Narcissa rejects Echo and the entire background is a throbbing echo, a tenuous stream of lights and streets and houses. She dances alone, moves into herself aided by a rope. There are no face to face conversations with either her mother or her sister, only the narrative of Petra and the close-ups of her mother. I see the three women as one. You, the audience, are the three women and so am I as I watch Elena find her image, find herself in the waters into which she plunges. We are all water time. Mirrors and coupling are abominable, Borges wrote, because they multiply the number of men and women. And Petra shows we are all one and the same. Elena finds herself in her image, in her dancing image, in her sad portrait. She ends, inexorably, fulfilling herself in suicide by joining time as water flowing. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished: to die, to sleep.

I saw and continue to see Elena (the film is the character) as an authentic vision of our mortality. "La derrota" - once again I quote Borges - "tiene una dignidad que la ruidosa victoria no merece. Defeat has a dignity that noisy victory does not deserve."

Last but not least. This is a film where woman is universal not man. Men have had centuries to represent the human predicament. Now it is woman’s turn to have an opportunity to make her own mistakes. I’m looking forward to her century. Although at age 83 I will not be around to see much. The men in Petra’s Elena are piedras, stones. They only make very short appearances - her father and her, I imagine, boyfriend. Static close-ups. I hope Elena receives in New York the recognition that eluded her during her life. Thanks."

Edmundo Desnoes is a renowned Cuban writer, author of the novel Memories of Underdevelopment, a complex story depicting the alienation of a Cuban bourgeois struggling to adapt to the process of the Revolution.