I’M MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER
For the first few years of my life, I called the camera "dad." Most of the time he was away for work while my mother, in Alcoi (Spain), recorded me so that he could see me grow. With her and my grandmother, we review home videos, ripped photographs, or my mother's diary written in a psychiatric facility. We search in the absence to value the presence.
An intimate documentary that looks into the absence to value the presence. Through home videos, torn-up photographs, and her mom’s diary written in a psychiatric center, the director tries to clarify family gaps and reconcile with the past and the present.
For the first ten years of my life I called the camera 'dad'. My father wasn't home for work and my mother recorded me so he wouldn't miss watching me grow. It's been over a decade since I last saw my father and I thought I didn't care about him anymore. One day, Sara, my mother, threw away all the photographs where he appeared. That's when I realized that it wasn't like that. "Who has pictures of someone who has been gone for 15 years as if this were family?" she told me.
'I am my mother's daughter' is an intimate documentary that looks into the absence to value the presence. With her and my grandmother, I review home videos, torn-up photographs, and also the diary my mother wrote during her stay in a psychiatric center to reflect on my own identity through the reconstruction of memories; to try to clarify family gaps and reconcile with the past and the present.
LAURA GARCÍA PÉREZ
During the first years of life I always had a camera in front of me, with it my father. He was in charge of recording all the important events. Over time it began to be less at home and I started calling the camera dad. In my teens it was gone forever and with him went my memories of the last few years. I preferred to forget everything he did to me damage and there was no one behind the camera to record everything my brain preferred forget.
I realized that to fill all that emptiness I had to face the past. How am I documentarian I decided that, for this, I had to do one about my father. To start with, I asked the family file to my mother, but she surprised me by telling me that there were no more photos of the three, that there were only photos of the two. That couldn't be because less than a month ago there had been reviewed those photographs and they still existed.
Had my mother been able to erase all those memories? Had I decided just now that I had mustered the determination to face it? But I realized that there was one place she couldn't have removed him from, the tapes. I started to see them and when I did I realized how wrong I had been all this time. I had called the camera daddy so many times that I thought he was the one recording me. It was my mother and not him.
This is a documentary that reflects on memory loss and the search for own identity through the reconstruction of the past. I had always thought that the I would discover the answer to “who am I” when I got to know my father better. but seeing all these videos I realized that the person who had always been there was my mother.
It made me understand that the person with whom I had to fill all that emptiness was with the
person who had always been and not with whom he had left. We will go walking together all that archival material and trying to clarify all the dark episodes that make up
our life. Can we change the past from the present?
