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"A Garden of Two Lands" is an intimate and deeply personal feature-length documentary by Ximena Pereira, exploring grief, uprooting, and memory within an exiled Chilean family. The project was born from the sudden death of the director’s father, Luis Pereira, in Chile during the pandemic, while his primary home was still in Venezuela. This loss drives Ximena to reconstruct her parents’ story—and her own—through a journey back to the family home in Venezuela.

The documentary weaves observational cinema, autobiographical essay, and symbolic performance, using the "garden" as a visual and metaphorical thread that connects Chile and Venezuela. The garden becomes a space of transition between life, death, and reconnection. The camera, as an extension of the director’s body, explores mourning through rituals, objects, and testimonies from family, friends, and Freemasons, revealing hidden layers of both personal and political history.

Synopsis

During the pandemic lockdown, I received a phone call that changed everything: my father had died of a heart attack in a supermarket in Rancagua. I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. By the time I arrived, his body had already been removed. I saw him one last time in a closed casket, with a face I didn’t recognize. Thus began a mourning that wasn’t only for him, but for everything left unsaid.

My family story is shaped by exile and unresolved farewells. My parents fled Chile in 1973 after the military coup. My father, an academic and militant of the Unidad Popular, was imprisoned and tortured. My mother managed to get him out of the country. Venezuela became our refuge, but also a space of emotional isolation. At home, affection was nearly absent, silent. That’s how we grew up, how they lived, how they died.

In his final years, my father lived between Chile and Venezuela. Our relationship was always difficult: he was rigid, austere; I, his only daughter, unable to accompany him in old age. I began filming him without telling him I was making a film. The camera became a bridge between his silence and my guilt.

After his death, I decided to take the trip he used to make: to return to Venezuela, to the city of my childhood, to the house he feared losing so deeply. I found the space overgrown with weeds and memory. There, I discovered what my mother had left behind when she died—her journals, her clothes, her objects—and I allowed myself to say goodbye to her as well. I filmed, I read, I dressed like them. Embodying them was my way of speaking to them.

Along the way, I was accompanied by people who knew him better than I did: the gardener from his final years, the neighbors from the condominium, the Freemasons with whom he shared a secret life. I recorded rituals, conversations, and gestures. I built a cinematic garden that unites the two lands that shaped us: Chile and Venezuela.

“A Garden of Two Lands” is my way of transforming grief into a creative act. It is a film about the farewells we never had, about the need to return in order to understand, and about how the body, the camera, and the earth can speak when words are no longer enough.

The Team

Post production image

Daniel Dávila

Since 1997, he has built a career as an animator and post-producer, working in Mexico at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica and founding Kiné Imágenes in Chile, which has provided post-production services to award-winning Latin American fiction and documentary films.

He has worked on more than 50 fiction films, including "De jueves a Domingo" by Dominga Sotomayor, "La Familia" by Gustavo Rondón, "Y de pronto el amanecer" by Silvio Caiozzi, more than 23 documentary feature films, including "El hombre nuevo" by Aldo Garay, 74 Square Meters by Paola Catillo and Tiziana Panizza, and several short films.

He currently runs his company DA cine imagen diseño. He worked with Ximena Pereira on her last two short films, "Espacio Moneda" and "La Diosa Quebrada."