It Runs in the Family

There's nothing quite like a bit of vicarious self-reflection...

Like all memories, they are subject to embellishment and/or deprecation as time marches on...Victoria Linares Villegas attempts to halt that deterioration, face the facts and present them as they now are...and, in doing so, she transfers herself into the story and it all becomes a bit of a vanity project.

Had the filmmaker not been distantly related to her subject...then, this is a film that would never have been made. This is a personal portrait, drawn rather sketchily with those vicarious overtones...there's too much waffle and not enough detail. Self-indulgence is never far away.

Bringing melodrama into a documentary is - quite frankly - bizarre and frustrating. “My memories of my childhood are disappearing,” states the director [and she's only in her 20s]...whoopie-do, that's what happens, memory is not infinite.

But...the drawing of parallels between herself and her [distant] relative [who died decades before she was born] is ludicrous. She has not been erased as - allegedly - her relative had been...there's a big difference between forgetting and erasure! Then [and, in many countries, still now] anti-governmental politics and homosexuality are two things that guarantee serious trouble...Oscar Torres probably fled for his life, for a better life. The director calls it familial erasure...we call it, wise flight [aka: emigration].

Less about the 'me' and more about the 'him' - may have yielded a far more interesting film.

Trailer...