Portrait of Dora Dolz

In 1965, Dora Dolz arrived in Rotterdam with her husband and daughter Sonia. She had an idealised image of Northern Europe, she tells in the portrait Sonia made of her, but the chill disappointed her. 'People were kinder to dogs than to children.' Still, she found her niche as an artist. The conversations with her mother, in which director Sonia Herman Dolz looms large, are alternated with a parade of Dora's gaudy paintings, colourful ceramics and exuberant glassware. Sonia shows the preparations for an exhibition, the breathtaking work of the glassblowers and her mother's eye operation. As a kind of frame tale, we see how Dora Dolz paints a family portrait, for which successive relatives pose. Soberly, Dora talks about love, death and loneliness, sings a few nostalgic Spanish songs and discusses the documentary with her daughter.