Director: Lorena Alvarado
Venezuela | 2024 | Spanish with English subtitles | 67 min | Docu-fiction
When Ena discovers a mysterious postcard inside a book, she embarks on a search across Caracas to uncover a forgotten writer. Her search gradually interweaves with her grandmother’s memory loss and her father’s quixotic dreams.After years living abroad, Ena returns to Venezuela with a fragmented sense of self. At home, she finds her grandmother losing her grasp of reality. Meanwhile, her father spends his days looking for rare books in an attempt to safeguard the country’s literary past.
Best Latin American Feature, Monterrey International Film Festival, 2024.
Characters and auteur alike are in the process of a kind of spiritual attempt at reclamation, the confrontation of a distance they seek to close through retrospection and excavation. It is a foregone time and space they yearn to inhabit, immemorial and suffused with personal and national meaning alike -Robert Wickers, The Knockturnal.
A master class in composition and sound design that leaves no detail to chance, Lorena Alvarado’s feature debut recalls the intellectual obsessiveness of Roberto Bolaño while achieving a remarkable sense of equanimity and emotional warmth from her real-life sister, father, and grandmother, whose on-screen naturalism never once lapses into mannerism -MoMA.
Preceded by Fiat Lux 5000 (dir. Daniel Eduvijes Carrera, 13 min)
