An autobiographical tale that cultivates a magical garden to heal the wounds of a migrant family dwelling in a broken home.
I am looking for my father along a journey that takes me back from Chile to the city of my childhood in Venezuela. His unexpected death has left a lonely house that has kept the history of my family since we migrated from Chile in 1973.
I make his death and that of my mother a long farewell ritual that lights up the garden of our lives.
Synopsis
I observe and film my elderly father, a Chilean who has spent 40 years in Venezuela, as he visits me during summers in Santiago, Chile, where we migrated from in 1973. Despite the discomfort of his presence, I decide to confront our difficult relationship by filming this documentary. Irreconcilable fights and years of discordant anger wound us, and I feel guilty for mistreating him.
During the pandemic, my father passes away from a heart attack, and grief leads me back to Venezuela, to the house of my childhood. Through the exploration of the house and the objects accumulated by my parents, I relive their lives and dress up as them, and the house becomes a stage where I narrate our family stories marked by geographical distance. Separated from my parents since the age of 17, this documentary weaves memory and seeks healing.
The Team
Production
Carolina Dávila
Venezuelan. Biologist, she has worked as Director, Executive Producer, Production Director, and Screenwriter of fiction and documentary films; she has created animated series for TV aimed at children, as well as served as a scientific advisor for natural history documentaries.
Director of the animated short film NO JILE, premiered at the Cannes Short Film Festival in 2015. She has actively participated in cinematographic policies aimed at Animation Cinema in Venezuela; Member of the Venezuelan Academy of Cinema and director of CaracasDoc, a documentary film festival. She resides in the city of Caracas, Venezuela.
More info >>
Soundman
Lino Ocando
Graduate in Audiovisual Media with a major in Sound from U.L.A. He has a vast career as a sound engineer in field and post-production.
He has worked on more than 12 feature films, 30 short films, and 20 documentaries in Venezuela, the United States, and Panama.
He was the sound engineer for "Yo imposible" by the prominent Venezuelan filmmaker Patricia Ortega and "Historias Pequeñas" by Rafael Marziano, for which he won Best Sound at the Venezuelan Film Festival in Mérida. He has won several awards for best sound and music at festivals.
More info >>
Direction / Production
Ximena Pereira
Chilean/Venezuelan filmmaker.
Independent director of short films, documentaries, and video art. Her short films have been selected for several international festivals such as Sundance and Montreal. Their short film "Espacio Moneda" won the best documentary short film award at the Mecal festival in Santiago, Chile.
She has worked on countless feature films and advertising as a script supervisor in Venezuela, Mexico, and Chile. She directed many TV documentaries in Venezuela. Among her achievements is the creation of the Caracas Documentary Festival (Caracas Doc). In Santiago, she was the production manager for the Instituto Profesional ARCOS Film and Audiovisual School from 2012 to 2016. She also has taught in film schools from Caracas and Santiago.
More info >>
Editing
Eduardo Viloria
His prowess as a documentarian stands out in his work with the collective project "La Célula Cooperativa Audiovisual," where he played key roles as co-director, screenwriter, cameraman, and editor in several documentary series.
He directed the award-winning documentary feature "HAY ALGUIEN ALLÍ" and co-edited "JUNTERA," a documentary by Giuliano Salvatore.
Recently, he directed "ABRIL_2002, LOS MEDIOS DE LA GUERRA" in 2022 and edited the trailer for Ximena Pereira's documentary "La Diosa Quebrada." He has been awarded the National Journalism Prize in Venezuela three times, highlighting his commitment to journalism and documentary storytelling.
More info >>
Co-Writer
Camila Villagrán
Camila Villagrán Gordon is a journalist and screenwriter passionate about telling good stories. Her career spans various formats, from series and soap operas, both in Chile and Mexico.
Camila has ventured into the world of documentary, advising on films such as "Niajra, feliz en triqui" and "Villa Olímpica: recuerdos de un mundo fuera de lugar," winner of Sanfic 2022. More recently, she wrote the scripts for the documentary series "Ancestros," awarded by the National Television Council in Chile. Currently, she continues her work as a screenwriter for unitary programs for Televisa, demonstrating her versatility and passion for storytelling in various media.
More info >>
Post production Sound
Marcos Salazar
Sound Engineer and Master in Documentary Film from the University of Chile. He performs sound post-production for fiction films and documentaries at his studio SUE Sonido Inmersivo, where he has worked on over 50 audiovisual projects as a mixer and sound designer.
He has collaborated with renowned Chilean documentarians such as Ignacio Agüero and Valeria Sarmiento, on a posthumous work by Raúl Ruiz. He worked with Ximena Pereira on her last two short films, "Espacio Moneda" and "La Diosa Quebrada."
More info >>
Director of photography
Camilo Paparoni
Graduate in Audiovisual Media with a major in Photography from U.L.A. His passion for photography and social cinema in Venezuela began at an early age under the influence of his father, a photographer.
In 2016, he received the Best Camera award for "Respira." His notable works include "Salta," special mention at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York 2017, and "Voy por ti," an official selection of the Miami Film Festival 2019. He is currently working as the director of photography for the documentary feature film "Casas Muertas" directed by the renowned Venezuelan documentarian Rosana Matecki.
More info >>
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."
More info >>
In today's world, the internal and spiritual dimensions of the vast majority of people are constantly under threat.
Family, home, and hearth are our fragile points, and due to various circumstances, they break more frequently than we can endure, understand, and much less transcend.
I believe in the healing and transformative power hidden within every human being. I believe in a world where the deep needs of the individual and collective soul find a central space.
I wish to share with others a personal healing process through this film, allowing me to reconstruct the broken home of my small migrant family.
Through a grand journey, both factual and subjective, I seek to heal a family history marked by uprooting and absence. Also, I want to be able to forgive the emotional and physical distance of my father.
From my intimate world, I dare to share fragments of my life and that of my family while transforming that story through performative scenes in which I carry out small psycho-magical acts that weave and rewrite the narrative, filling the voids and healing the wounds.
I am a character and serve as a pawn in a family constellation; my role as a healer merges with my role as a narrator and filmmaker, seeking to find a language that, through the art of storytelling, recounts an intense, complex process. This also involves contextualizing the history of migrations from Chile to Venezuela and from Venezuela to Chile through my own experience and my family history.
By sharing this process in a cinematic form, I seek resonance and echo among migrant groups and society at large.
Ximena Pereira:
Statement of intent by the director
Companies
.jpg)
