>> Catalog 2025

Letters to My Dead Parents

Cartas a mis padres muertos

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CHILE / 2025 / Spanish / Color / DCP / 106 min

Director, Script, Narration: Ignacio Agüero
Photography: David Bravo, Ignacio Agüero, Claudio Aguilar
Editing: Claudio Aguilar, Ignacio Agüero
Sound: Marcos Salazar
Producer: Tehani Staiger
Production Company: IGNACIO AGÜERO & ASOCIADO
World Sales: Uma Pedra no Sapato

Looking out at the sky outside his window, the filmmaker’s gaze shows us the plants, cats and birds of his garden, as he speaks about his parents, who have long since passed away. His mother had participated as an extra in his first film, made under the military regime, his father had worked in a pipe factory with a powerful labor union. The film merges testimony from his father’s colleague with his father’s film reels, along with excerpts from his own earlier works, and private family footage— blending the harsh history experienced by the Chilean people with private memories. The filmmaker’s narrative is far from linear, marked by digressions and interruptions as it flows between dream and reality, while giving shape to an incomplete archive where the living and the dead meet. (NK)

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[Director’s Statement] Extending the film’s timeline like a large tablecloth on which the most diverse images will be placed, without proposing a discourse to tell the viewer anything, but rather inviting them to accompany the film’s work on its journey to escape its own confusion.

That journey is the film, with its pauses, interruptions, and detours, in which an Aunt Lucy, a union leader, and the dead parents’ eagerness to know what neither they nor we know suddenly appear.