Mercedes Raquel Barcha Pardo
The Remarkable Woman Behind Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mercedes Raquel Barcha Pardo, muse and gatekeeper of the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who played a crucial role in the publication of his breakthrough novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” “Mercedes permeates all my books,” Marquez once said. “There’s traces of her everywhere.” Barcha was born on November 6, 1932, in Magangué, Colombia. Barcha is best known for her financial and emotional support of her Nobel Prize-winning husband, the author Gabriel García Márquez. She died in 2020. In 2014, after García Márquez's death, she served as the President Emerita of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism in Cartegena, Colombia. In 2017, she founded the Fundación Gabo to promote García Márquez's legacy. For nearly 60 years, she was the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s companion and inspiration, his sharp-witted foil and his chief of staff. Barcha played a crucial role in the publication of his breakthrough novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” She pawned the telephone, radio, jewelry, four-wheeler and pawned her hair dryer to pay the postage to send her husband’s manuscript to his Argentinian editor.
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Ketevan Beraia
PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR
Ketevan Beraia is a recent graduate of the New York Film Academy’s Documentary Filmmaking Conservatory course. Her thesis film “Oto Baya” has been accepted to screen at DOC /NYC in November, 2022.
Prior to moving to New York, Beraia worked as a producer and hot-spot reporter for Georgian Public Broadcaster Channel 1’s news program, “Moambe.”
She directed and produced six documentary films, including “Angels of Death.” filmed in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. The film is about the Women Peshmerga Unit fighting against ISIS, head by Colonel Nahida Ahmed Rashid. The film included interviews with Colonel and other high ranking women military staff and exercises on the military base in 2016.