Victor Erice's 'El Sur' (1983)

[00:00:19] Hello, welcome to another episode of Her Head in Films. I'm Caitlin and I'm your host. On this podcast, I share my thoughts and feelings about the films I watch. They tend to be art house and world cinema.

[00:00:32] What makes this podcast unique is that I weave together my life experiences with a personal and emotional discussion of film. I explore the impact that cinema has on me and why I connect so deeply to it. As I like to say, my head isn't in the clouds, my head is in films.

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[00:01:20] On today's episode, I'm talking about Victor Arethe's 1983 film El Sur. Set in northern Spain during the 1940s and 1950s, the film follows Estrella, a woman looking back on two distinct periods of her life, her childhood and adolescence. At the center of her memories is her enigmatic father, Augustine, a man she deeply loved but can never fully understand.

[00:01:49] As Estrella gradually uncovers fragments of his past and becomes fascinated by the distant south he left behind, she begins to realize that the father she knew as a child carried a hidden history and a private sorrow that will forever remain beyond her reach.

[00:02:08] I talk about the shadow my father's death has cast over my life, how our parents can continue to haunt us long after they're gone, and how certain films can become an encounter with our own lives. I also discuss the novella the film is based on. There are spoilers in this episode. First, I want to talk a little bit about why I chose this film. And I also want to say that this episode is dedicated to my parents.

[00:02:36] My father, Michael, who died in 2006, and my mother, Susan, who died last year in 2025. They existed, they mattered, and they were precious to me. They made me who I am. If people remember me in some way because of this podcast, I hope that they also remember my parents.

[00:03:00] El Sur is a film about parents and children, and so I thought it was fitting to return to this film at a particularly emotional period of my life. The anniversary of my father's death and my mother's death are very close together. And this year in 2026 marked 20 years since my father died when I was 16 years old. And 2026 also marks the one-year anniversary of my mother's death.

[00:03:30] Ilser felt like the perfect film to help me process the loss of these two people. For me, cinema is an encounter with the past, with myself, with something deep, mysterious, and ineffable about life. Often I am changed through that encounter, and that is what I try to communicate on this podcast.

[00:03:55] The encounter with the work of art, with the film, and the transformation that I undergo as I watch it. I'm recording this episode in the middle of the night in my room. It's almost completely dark except for a candle. I am speaking from my darkness. I'm speaking from a metaphorical darkness and a literal darkness in a lot of ways with this episode.

[00:04:24] And I'm hoping to reach others. That is all I can offer. El Sur, the film, and the book, both of them, touched my soul, and they are part of my soul. I will be talking about the novella in this episode, but I will not give away any kind of details about Astraea's journey to the South that is included in the book.

[00:04:49] And that Aretha wanted to include in the film, but was unable to. But I will refer to the book and share some quotes from it. So both the book and the film are part of my soul because I see parts of myself in Astraea. Returning to this film gave me a container for the grief over my parents.

[00:05:15] It gave me a space to remember them and to remember my childhood. And this episode allows me to capture what the film made me feel and what it opened inside me. It was, in many ways, a kind of reunion with my father and a confrontation with what his death has done to me all these years and how my parents have shaped me.

[00:05:41] In this episode, I will speak from an open heart, a grieving heart, a broken heart, and a heart that still wants to love and to live. I will try to find the words to describe what this film means to me, but I apologize if they are inadequate. And I may meander a little bit. But I hope that you can have patience and allow me to walk through this film.

[00:06:07] It's almost like walking through a house and entering different rooms and sitting down in them. And I may talk about memories I have. I will talk about my parents. And, of course, it will all be grounded in the film itself and, at times, the novella, which is a heartbreaking and beautiful book. It is one of my favorite books of all time.

[00:06:33] The Criterion Blu-ray includes the novella as well, but I read a different edition a couple of years ago. Like Estrella, a part of my life is over. Estrella is looking back. She's looking back at her father in particular and at her childhood. As I said, I see parts of myself in her and I'll talk more deeply about that as this episode goes on.

[00:06:58] I think the anniversaries of my parents' deaths, it really hit me this year that that part of my life is over. I look back on it the way that Estrella is, as an adult, looking back at her own childhood and her own life with her father and mother. I think what this film helped me realize is that it's not really about solving anything or even healing.

[00:07:27] It's about acknowledging that none of it can be undone. I can't bring the dead back to life. And for so long in my life, I could not cope or accept my father's death. It changed the trajectory of my life. I think with my mother's death, it's hard for me to describe how her death has affected the way that I see his death.

[00:07:54] I think that there's something very profound when both of your parents are gone. And I've realized that I've been haunted by him for 20 some years now. And I have to ask myself, do I want to be haunted for 20 more? Do I want to be haunted for the rest of my life? Do I want to be unable to live? Now that she is gone, I can't allow myself to drown.

[00:08:23] Because I feel like after my father died, obviously, the thing about it is that a piece of me died with both of them. A piece of me died when he died and a piece of me died when she died. That's just the truth. But for a long time, I was in the death. When I lost him, I was in the death. I was in the grave. It was like one foot in the grave and one foot out. And I was so haunted by it. Haunted by his pain. Haunted by his suffering.

[00:08:54] Haunted by his own unfinished life because he died at 45. Haunted by all of it. And I didn't know how to live. With my mother's death and both of them being gone, I know that I have to live. I must live. They would want me to. I can't go back. And I can't save him. And I couldn't save her either. She died of cancer. And I took care of her in hospice. I could not save my parents.

[00:09:21] I think I was haunted a long time by not being able to save my father. And Estrella can't save Augustine either, can she? That's what the film leaves us with at the end. None of it can be healed. None of it can be undone. And I will never know who I could have been if he had not died. I only know who I am right now and who I can be. Not just a haunted woman anymore. But a strong one. A brave one. A creative one.

[00:09:51] A living one. Who honors them. And remembers them. And loves them. Always. And I think for a long time, for these past 20 years, up to the point when my mother died, I think I did try to solve it or to make sense of it or to understand it. Maybe even to understand him. But I can't be haunted for another 20 years. I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can live that way. And for me, this film is...

[00:10:18] It connected me as well to the fact that it's not just about the loss of a parent. It's also about the time that was spent with them. It's about them as a person. It's about Estrella and Augustine dancing at her communion. It's about her running toward him when he arrives on the motorcycle. It's also about the life that Estrella had with him. The life that we know through that parent.

[00:10:46] But in the end, they are unknowable as well. And just as the film is unfinished, Aretha sees it as unfinished. But I don't think it's incomplete. And I'll talk more about that. My father's life is unfinished. And maybe my life as well is unfinished. Or I feel like it's unlived. That because I lost him so early, I said I don't know how... I haven't known how to live.

[00:11:14] And so I'm carrying his unfinished life and my unlived life. But the past is done. We can remember it. We can probe it the way that Estrella is doing in the film. And the way that the female protagonist does in the novella. But at some point, it must be laid to rest. We don't know if Estrella got all the answers in the film. We can imagine that she did. We can imagine that she made peace with her father.

[00:11:43] In what she discovers about him on her journey to the South. And that's what Aretha wanted to show. He thought that journey was important for her own understanding of Augustine. And her own reconciliation with this man who has cast his own shadow over her life. What this film made me realize, and I guess the gift of the film, is that I must make peace with my father.

[00:12:10] I must let his life continue inside me instead of allowing his death to destroy me. And it's the same with my mother. I can't let her death do to me what my father's death did to me. I think I realized that when I lost her. Because this is a grief and a pain that will annihilate you. It will extinguish you. The full force of the agony of losing her.

[00:12:38] And I guess that's why something's been activated in me. To go toward life. I must go toward life. And when he died, I went toward death. I must go toward life. And I must make peace with the past. I must make peace with what happened to him. With what he suffered. With the fact that I didn't get enough time with him. 16 years. 15 for Estrella. It wasn't enough. And it wasn't right. And it tore me apart.

[00:13:07] But I can't change it. I can't bring him back. And I can't bring her back either. They're gone. And if I am to be haunted, let me be haunted by the love. Let me be haunted by the connection. Not just the horror of the dying. Let me be haunted by the beautiful memories of them. I'm still their daughter. And I always will be. And I will love them until my last breath. They live inside me now. And that is why I live. That's why I continue.

[00:13:37] Is to remember them. And to honor them. And to carry them on. But I must make peace with it. That's what this film gave me. I'm alive. And I'm here. And they made me. They created me. And I know they would want me to live. I know that. So that's why I chose to talk about it. I chose to talk about it. Because at one of the worst times of my life. That's what saves me. Is cinema. It saves me. I can truly say that.

[00:14:07] And I've said it for 10 years. That these films are more than just films to me. They are life-saving. And life-changing. And transformative. And they give us so much. Don't they? And this film is just. It's part of me. In every way. So I'm gonna actually talk about the film now. I'm gonna talk about the making of the film. I want to touch on the novella. Then I'll just talk about different scenes. Like I told you.

[00:14:36] This is a little bit of a more raw, vulnerable, looser type of episode. So the film was released in 1983. Directed by Victor Erice. I love Aretha. I've also seen Spirit of the Beehive. But I need to see the rest of his filmography. I haven't seen Close Your Eyes yet. But I know that it's connected to Elser. I wanted to do this episode purely from a place of just seeing Elser.

[00:15:05] I didn't want to see anything else related to it that Aretha created later on. So that was on purpose by me. I want to go through the cast. So Omero Antonuti plays Augustine, the father. And he is spectacular in this role. Really, really haunting. We have Sansolis Arangaran as Astraea when she's around 7 or 8 years old.

[00:15:33] We have Ithiar Boyane as Astraea as a teenager when she's around 15 years old. We have Aurora Clément as Irene Rios. That's her stage name. And then her real name is Laura. We have Lola Cardona as Julia, Augustine's wife and Astraea's mother. And a very important cinematographer worked on this film, Jose Luis Alcain.

[00:16:01] And he also works with Pedro Almodovar quite a bit. And he's very well known for that. So I want to talk about the making of the film, the circumstances surrounding why it is unfinished in a way. Aretha sees it as unfinished. I think that those of us who admire the film and love it don't quite see it the exact same way that Aretha does.

[00:16:28] According to Senses of Cinema, and I will have all of my sources in the episode description if you want to go and read more about the film, according to Senses of Cinema, the shooting of El Sur was abruptly halted around the Christmas holidays. And it was never resumed. So the production stopped. It was actually planned to go on for about 80 some days.

[00:16:56] And it only went for around 48 days. We've never gotten a full answer as to why the production was halted. But it was so Aretha took what had been filmed and he put it together to create the film that we have, the El Sur that exists. And it was sent to the Cannes Film Festival where there was a massive emotional response to it. People absolutely loved it.

[00:17:26] But this version cut out half the film that Aretha envisioned. According to Elvira Lindo for Criterion Collection, he saw the film as being about two and a half hours. And it would include the journey to the South. The South is like this mythical place where Estrella's father Augustine has come from. That is where his family is.

[00:17:54] That is where everybody who loved him lives. She was going to go there and find out about his origins and history and learn more about him. All of that is in the novella by Adelaida Garcia Morales. I'm going to talk about the novella in a moment. But Adelaida Garcia Morales was married to Victor Aretha at the time. The novella has everything.

[00:18:19] It has her relationship with Augustine, his death, and then it has her journey to the South and what she uncovers about her father. And Aretha thought that was essential to include. And he envisioned the film as having both parts. Her life in the North, living in the home, the seagull, with her father and mother. Then Augustine takes his own life.

[00:18:47] And then she travels to the South to find out more about this man who remained mysterious and enigmatic to her when he was alive. She learns about the origins of his sorrow and the estrangement with his family, the break with his father, all of that, when she goes to the South. But Aretha was not able to include that in the film because the production stopped.

[00:19:13] According to sources, apparently the production had run out of money. That's the official excuse for why the production stopped. But Aretha and the cinematographer, Jose Luis Alcain, do not believe that to be the case, apparently. We may never know definitively why the producer halted the production. It happened. We can't go back. We can't change it.

[00:19:43] We will never know what the film would have been like if Aretha had been allowed to include Estrella's journey to the South. I agree with Elvira Lindo when she writes, quote,

[00:20:15] And I agree. Aretha may see it as unfinished. And maybe it is. I mean, literally it's unfinished. He could not film the full script. But is it incomplete? No, I don't think it is. And I think the people who love this film see it as a masterpiece. And I think it's interesting to just linger for a moment on fidelity to the book versus fidelity to the feeling of the story.

[00:20:45] Aretha wanted to be faithful to the novella. He had a vision about it. It could also be that because he was married to Adelaida Garcia Morales, that he wanted to also be very faithful to the novella. Right. Or he just had his own experience with the story. And he wanted. I watched interviews with Aretha. And he wanted Estrella to have a journey.

[00:21:14] A journey of revelation. Of understanding about Augustine. Of Augustine. And ultimately a reconciliation. Understanding the man that she loved. I think he wanted closure for Estrella. But the strength of the film is that it doesn't give us closure. Because when it comes to a wound like the one that Estrella suffers. There never is closure. There never is full healing with that.

[00:21:43] It works better that we don't get all the answers about Augustine. The South lives as a dream. And the journey is one that we can imagine Estrella taking. So while he might have wanted to be faithful to the book. The film is more faithful to the feeling of the book than the plot of the book. Because the novella is about being haunted by the death of a parent.

[00:22:10] The novella goes into more of the pain and the abandonment that Estrella, in the book she's named Adriana. He changed the name for the film. And the protagonist in the novella is more destroyed by the death of Augustine. I can't remember the father's name in the novella if they changed it for the film as well. She's more destroyed by her father's death.

[00:22:35] And the novella is written as like she's talking to her dead father. It's incredibly affecting and haunting because of that. Because she's writing directly to her father. And she's trying to understand this man. Understand his pain, his suffering, and why he did what he did. Why he left her in the world without him. It's a book about being haunted, right? It's a book about a deep wounding.

[00:23:03] It's a book about looking back on your childhood and trying to understand your parents. There's so much emotion in the book. And so I think the film is actually very faithful to the feeling of the book and the emotion of it. And it wasn't really necessary to go to the South. I understand why Aretha wanted to include it.

[00:23:27] But I have to be honest that as I watched his interviews about what he wanted to do with the second half of the film, he goes into all kinds of detail about he wanted Estrella to go to the South with Augustine's pendulum. And he wanted her to do X, Y, and Z. And he had it all plotted out. And even as I listened to him describe what he wanted to do,

[00:23:53] I was like, I think it's better that none of that is included in this film. It may be what he wanted. And that was his artistic vision. And I do think we should respect the artist's vision, of course. But I think the film is stronger because it is unfinished, quote unquote. Because there's a lack of closure. Because it leaves us with an absence. And Estrella is left with an absence, isn't she?

[00:24:22] And so the film itself also has an absence built into it. And I find that to be more powerful. I think the film also keeps Augustine as a mystery, as an unknowable and unreachable figure. I think that's truer to the feeling of the story and the feeling of the novella. Before I get too far into the episode, I did want to briefly touch on the Spanish Civil War and its place in the film.

[00:24:50] To understand Elser, it's helpful to know a little bit about the Spanish Civil War. It happened between 1936 and 1939. And during this time, Spain was torn apart by a very brutal civil war between the Republican government and the nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco. Franco's forces ultimately won the war. And he established a dictatorship that lasted until his death in 1975.

[00:25:19] Iritha also looks at post-war Spain in the spirit of the beehive. The Spanish Civil War divided families, friends, and entire communities. People found themselves on opposite sides politically and ideologically.

[00:25:36] And many who had supported the Republican cause, like Estrella's parents, were imprisoned, executed, forced into exile, or they lived under suspicion for decades. The wounds of the war continued to shape everyday life throughout Franco's dictatorship. Elser takes place during those years of dictatorship.

[00:26:01] Augustine has left his home in southern Spain after being estranged from his Franco supporting father. And he carries that political and personal rupture with him throughout the film. Although Elser is deeply intimate and personal, the Spanish Civil War haunts these characters. It fractures, it fractures Augustine's family.

[00:26:25] And that fracture reflects the larger divisions that the war left all across Spain. So I just wanted to say that and include it. The break with his father and the break with his family is a crucial part of Augustine's history. It's why he leaves. It's a big part of why he leaves. And of course, his relationship with Irene Rios or Laura is also a very important part of his history as well.

[00:26:55] This woman that he was in love with. For Criterion Collection, Elvira Lindo also writes that the film was released in 1983. Quote, just a year after the Socialists came to power in Spain for the first time, since its transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. Unquote. She also says that at that time, when the film was made, when Elser was released,

[00:27:24] people wanted like happier films, happier art. She says that like pop art and post-modernism was really popular. There was this desire to forget the past. But Elser is the complete opposite of that. It is a film going deeply into the past. And just as Estrella is looking back on her childhood, looking back on her past,

[00:27:47] maybe Elser is also inspiring other people in Spain to look at the past, to look at what's happened in the country. Elvira writes that it took people back to the 40s, to that post-Civil War time. And she also writes that Aretha had the ability to enter, quote, the complex and imaginative world of a child's perspective.

[00:28:12] He knows how to portray the way children interpret the silences and secrets of their parents, which in the Spain of the 40s, just after the war, were numerous. Unquote. And so now I want to talk a moment about the novella. As I said, it was written by Adelaida Garcia Morales, who was then married to Victor Aretha. The novella was published in the 1980s. Morales herself was born in 1945,

[00:28:41] and she died in 2014. There's not a ton of information about Adelaida in the English-speaking world, so I couldn't do an extensive type of research about her. I read the book a couple of years ago. I read a version translated by Thomas G. Devaney. I'm not sure if that's the version included in the Blu-ray or not, because I don't own the Blu-ray right now,

[00:29:09] but I definitely want to get it so that I can have that copy of the novella. The version of the novella that I read was on archive.org, and I'll put a link to it in the description of the episode. So I read an electronic scan of the book, and I would love to have a physical copy, so I'll definitely be picking up the Blu-ray. In the novel, the woman is named Adriana, not Estrella,

[00:29:37] but many of the same things are in the book as in the film. She's enchanted by her father. She deeply loves him. It's also a dreamy book. It is about a woman coming to terms with the mysterious inner life of her father, trying to understand him as a person who created her, but was separate from her. And I do think that this is why this story is so powerful for me. It is about parents and children, right?

[00:30:07] That's a big part of it, being haunted by the death of a parent, but also coming to terms with the reality that your parents are separate from you, that they have their own history and their own inner life that you may never fully understand or know. And it's easy to forget that our parents are not like an extension of us, or they didn't just magically begin as people when we were born. They have their own heartaches and memories.

[00:30:37] And when they die, they take their internal world with them, and they become unknowable to us. It is this unknowability that often haunts us the most when we've lost a parent early in life. I only had 16 years with my father. I had almost 36 years with my mother. So my relationship to her is totally different than my father. And my relationship with her death is different

[00:31:05] than the relationship I had with my father's death, isn't it? He remains, like Augustine, shadowed. He remains in shadow. He remains this more remote figure because I didn't have as much time to get to know him. As the years pass after the early death of a parent, I believe that silence consumes the space they leave behind. They are impenetrable, unknowable.

[00:31:31] They're almost closer to dream than reality. Their existence almost feels made up, right? Like this mirage. And that is what's so powerful about the book is that it circles around that silence. It circles around a void, basically, around the impenetrable mystery of another person. The father who is forever gone. And she can only speak to him through her words. That he cannot speak back.

[00:32:01] He can't answer her. That's what's so powerful about reading the book is that she's talking to him. She's talking directly to the ghost of her father. And her father was magical to her. He had the pendulum, right? But he was also tortured. And he held secrets. And his death leaves the female protagonist lost. She feels alone in the world. And she's searching for answers about who he was. If you have lost a parent early in life,

[00:32:31] there's something about this book. It is... It has like an electric charge about it. And I was overwhelmed by it. And I need to reread it at some point. But my experience of it was so intense. There's more pain in the book. Because she's speaking in her own voice. And she does narrate the film. The older Estrella, the adult Estrella, is looking back at when she was around seven.

[00:33:00] And then when she was 15. But the voice that we hear in the film is of an adult woman. Trying to make sense of that period of her life. Of the memories of this man who is forever gone and has vanished. The book begins with an epigraph by Holderlin. And it says, What can we love that is not a shadow? And I think that perfectly encapsulates so much. And so I wanted to share a few quotes from the book. You emptied me of everything.

[00:33:29] And you opened a desolate cavity in my soul. You left me alone, wandering aimlessly with a tedium that weighed upon me like a stone. Look, you told me. The worst suffering is the kind that doesn't have any particular reason. It comes from everywhere and from nothing in particular. It's as if it didn't have a face. To me, you were an enigma.

[00:33:57] A special being who had arrived from another land. From a legendary city that I had visited only once and that I remembered like the scenery from a dream. It was a fantastic place where the sun seemed to shine with a different light and where an obscure passion made you leave, never to return. You don't know how well I already understood the death you chose. I think I inherited not only your face, shaded with Mama's coloring,

[00:34:27] but also your enormous capacity for despair and above all for isolation. Even now, the greater the solitude that surrounds me, the better I feel. However, I felt so abandoned that night. I will never forget the impenetrable darkness that covered the house when you disappeared. It's funny how what was not visible, what didn't really exist, caused me to live the most intense moments

[00:34:56] of my childhood. I remember the hours we spent in the garden dedicated to that game you invented and which only you and I played. I would hide some little object so you could find it with your pendulum. Then I thought that whatever is left in the realm of the possible, whatever does not come to exist, is always better. And this quote really could be used to describe the film

[00:35:24] because the second half of the film never came into being. It doesn't exist, but it's somehow more powerful. The dream of the journey to the South that we never see on the screen, but it lives in our imagination. In her review for Criterion Collection, Elvira Lindo quotes Aretha talking about Adelaide. And he said of Adelaide,

[00:35:53] she was, quote, not like any other person, nor was she a phantasmagoria. She achieved a certain amount of literary fame, which was ephemeral. She wrote from a place of real pain. Her primordial wound was very deep and longstanding. She was never able to integrate into society and her time, unquote. And then Elvira takes that line

[00:36:21] that she wrote from a place of pain and says, quote, this is exactly what we find in this story. Real pain and trauma nourished in childhood, which can never be healed, unquote. And that's the power of the story. Because we are denied that journey to the South, we are denied the closure of Estrella learning more about her father and reconciling with his memory

[00:36:51] or his ghost. There's a lack of closure to the film, right? And that actually, like I said, is more faithful to the feeling of the story itself in the book because we are denied closure and healing. There is no healing in Elser. He kills himself. He's laying on the ground with a gun. And we don't understand why this man did this. And Estrella never fully understands

[00:37:21] why he did it either. But she knows that her life has been touched by it. And I understand that wound because when my father died in 2006, I was touched by that pain. And then my mother died in 2025. That was a pain that touched me as well. But when I was 16 and he died, it was like a door opened and something dark and menacing

[00:37:48] and horrific was unleashed into my life. His death touched everything. Not a single part of me is unscathed by it. And I've still been coming to terms with his absence and what it did to me and how it is the source of my deepest hunger, the hunger to be loved because I lost his love so early on. And it trapped me in the world of the dead where I feel like

[00:38:17] I've been walking for 20 years and I haven't known how to live because I'm not just here. I've never been just here. I've always been also in the past, in the dream of the past with my parents. And now that they're both gone, I guess I'm still there in some ways that I'm not fully here, that maybe some part of me will always be in the past. And I slip back into that world often now

[00:38:47] because of the loneliness of no longer having them and how unbearable that is. And I think after I watched this film, I asked myself, what ghost have I been chasing all my life? Because that's what it feels like, that I've been chasing his ghost and I have lived in that shadow that his death cast over my life. And it's fitting that the film doesn't give us closure because there never is truly any closure.

[00:39:17] And I think once your parents are gone, the mystery only grows. And I built my life around the void that his death left. A void that I couldn't feel. A ghost I couldn't catch. This bottomless emptiness. Forever haunted by this man who was lost to me. And at times I thought that the void would claim me. And maybe sometimes it did claim me. I felt very self-destructive for a very long time.

[00:39:47] And it felt like everything, felt like that void just sucked everything. It was like this vortex. This dark vortex that sucked everything out. Sucked my life force. And when I see younger Astraea and older Astraea, you know, seven-year-old Astraea, and then when she's 15, I feel like those are also the two parts of me. Actually, it's more like 15-year-old Astraea

[00:40:16] and then adult Astraea who's narrating the film. Those are the two parts of me. The adult and the teenager. The girl who lost her father and then the woman who lost her mother almost 20 years apart. And I've often felt that adult me is looking back at teenage me. I think my mother's death has changed how I view my father's death in this way because I felt very ashamed for a long time

[00:40:44] after I lost my father that I couldn't handle it. That it traumatized me. That I collapsed. That I couldn't deal with it. The vortex sucked me in. That the darkness overtook me. And I felt so destroyed by it. And I felt so ashamed to be destroyed by it. Because I would see other people who were able to live. Who were able, you know, to have these productive beautiful lives. And I feel like

[00:41:14] I've just crawled and crawled for decades now. That I haven't been able to get out of the clutches of what his death did to me. But when my mother died I felt, I have felt completely blown apart by it. It is the darkest, most agonizing, soul-shattering experience I've ever known to lose my mother. And I have endured it almost completely alone. And I'm an adult

[00:41:42] who's almost 37 years old. And I'm struggling from day to day to survive this. I see more clearly what my teenage self was up against. I understand why she couldn't handle it. I understand that everything she did she was just doing her best to survive it. Because I'm an adult and I can't handle it. So imagine what happens inside of a teenager or a child. I have so much

[00:42:11] more compassion for myself now. I understand why I did certain things to survive. To stay alive. because I didn't want to be alive for a very, very long time. Even if other people can't understand the choices I made or why I couldn't adjust to life better or be a more accomplished or successful person. I understand. And I have compassion for myself now. And I treat myself with

[00:42:41] so much care and compassion and gentleness. This wound is in me and it will always be part of me. But it is also the source of my compassion and my empathy. This is the part of me that is very tender and sacred. It is sacred to grieve. It's sacred to remember them. This is soul work. You know, the wound bears witness to what was known and felt and loved. The absence

[00:43:10] is immense because the presence was too. These are the people, the man and the woman who created me. Who gave me life and breath and the ability to experience art. But when they died, they also gave me a wound that I have to live with now. And it will always be part of me. His death and her death. But their life is part of me too. And what matters is not healing those wounds. They will never heal.

[00:43:40] They will never heal. It's there and it's in me. What matters is to choose life, even when it means that I must live without them. It is imperative that I get up every day and that I keep going and that I walk toward life always. That I reach for life. And I hope that this episode reaches other people who might also live with the same wound because it's still very unusual to lose both

[00:44:10] of your parents by your 30s. And it is rare to lose a parent when you're very young, when you're in your teens. And it will affect you the rest of your life. It's very devastating. So now I just want to go through the film. I've already been referring to the film as I talk about all this stuff. Now I'm going to just talk about scenes and different things that have an emotional charge to them. Something that occurred to me with this film, it opens

[00:44:39] with obviously Estrella with the pendulum that Augustine leaves under her pillow. This is such a film about childhood. As I said, the voice of adult Estrella is narrating the film and remembering when Augustine left her and then when she spent time with him and the magical being that her father was. Something that occurred to me as I was watching is that it feels like

[00:45:08] childhood is I do think that this is possibly the most powerful film about being an adult and looking back at your childhood. And it's one thing to be 25 and to look back 10 years when you were 15. I find as I get older, my relationship to the past evolves and changes. And it's such a, it's a hard experience to even describe to be almost

[00:45:37] 37 years old and to realize I was 16, 20 years ago. And there are these things that you think you'll never forget and then you do forget things. For me, this film is about how childhood, it feels like this period of our lives that's never finished, that it's always open and it's so short. It's such a, like, you only realize that as you get older, how short your childhood is.

[00:46:07] Once you get in your 30s and beyond and you look back, technically you're only a child for 18 years, like, legally. And if you live into your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, right, like, the majority of your life is going to be spent in your adulthood. And it's even shorter if you're thinking about when you were 10 or younger. And really, does anybody remember things when they were 2?

[00:46:36] So your memory only goes back so far. When you're thinking about when you were 7, that's a very compressed time. I mean, I'm still stunned at times when I will smell something. There will be a smell that reminds me, like, for instance, coffee at times will remind me of my grandparents' house. When I go outside in the mornings, sometimes there's a scent in the air that will remind me when I used to stand outside and catch the

[00:47:05] bus when I was in elementary school. And it is wild to smell something and to immediately be transported back to when you were 7 or 8 years old. But it is so vivid. And that is what this film captures for me. It's the lighting. Aretha was inspired by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and you feel it. You feel it in the light of this film.

[00:47:35] It is the light of childhood. It is the golden amber light of childhood. And it is this period that is so charged because it's short. I can't tell you what I did a week ago, right? But I can tell you 30 years ago about a smell that I had when I was catching the bus. Who can explain it? But these memories kind swirl inside of us. And they can be

[00:48:04] unearthed by a scent or even watching a film. As I was watching El Sir itself, I had memories of being with my father. Or I had memories of being with my mother. I remembered being a little girl, being in my childhood home with my parents in the next room. I remembered the joy that I felt being with my father. I was a daddy's girl. And I look like my father. When I look in the mirror, I see his face, particularly

[00:48:34] as I get older. My personality was closer to my father's. He was more introverted and shy. And then my mother was more outgoing and gregarious. So there were things I had in common with him. He really loved music and that was something that he shared with me. So he would give me albums and I have a very deep passion for music. Our childhood, it feels like it's this door that never fully closes or it's like this period of our

[00:49:04] lives that are, that's not fully finished. I know it's sealed off. I know I can't go back to it. I know that I can't change anything that happened in those rooms, in that house. And it's so eerie when both of your parents are gone and you realize I'm the memory keeper. I'm an only child and I'm the only one who remembers these moments. We were so close. We called ourselves the three musketeers, me, my mom and dad.

[00:49:33] And I am the one who carries those memories now that my mother's gone because I used to go to my mother and talk about things that we lived through together and memories we had of my father. And now I can't do that because she's not here anymore. And she was a witness to my life. She was a witness to my father's life. And now I'm the only witness to both of their lives. I'm the only witness to the life that we three

[00:50:03] shared in that house together. The film just perfectly captures our enchantment with our parents, how magical they feel. When you see Augustine with the pendulum, he's a doctor and he's also a dowser where he uses the pendulum to find water in the ground. And he's this magical being to Estrella. And I remember that feeling. I remember when my father would come home from work and I would be excited to see him. I remember

[00:50:33] my mother's presence in my daily life. And our parents are larger than life often, aren't they? And the film just captures the beauty of that bond in those early years when you're very young. For Estrella, the bond becomes more complicated. When she gets into her teens and she sees the way that her father is tormented, it's like when she, I was wondering to myself as I watched it, I was like, I wonder if we

[00:51:03] actually understand our parents better when we're children. I don't know if other people would agree with that, but I think as we get older, we try to diagnose them or psychoanalyze them. There's a lot of therapy speak online. And I understand how if you have a very painful relationship with your parents or you have abusive or harmful parents, I totally understand why you would need to work through all of that. But sometimes I

[00:51:33] wonder if we are too quick to try to reduce our parents to a diagnosis or this or that. And I think for me, I prefer to let my father have his mystery. I prefer to let him be unknowable to me. I have some overlap with Astraea in that I'm estranged from both sides of my family. And I've been estranged from my father's family the entire past 20 years. And so there

[00:52:02] are parts of my father that are literally unknowable to me. I can't talk to his siblings. I can't talk to people who knew him when he was a child. I'm never going to make that journey that she makes to the south. I stay away from them because of things that happened after he died and also when he was alive. And so my father will remain in a kind of darkness or shadow. There is so much about him that I will never know.

[00:52:31] And now there's many things about my mother that I'll never know. And I think that the film captures some of our relationship with our parents, especially if you had a very close relationship, not fully understanding them, not understanding their entire history and all of their wounds and everything that they've been through, but trying to, trying to decipher somebody who's enigmatic and inaccessible to you.

[00:53:01] And the way you circle that or go back to it, I don't think I was ever trying to solve my father or understand everything about him. I think I was just haunted by the loss itself and I was also haunted by his unfinished life. He was 45 and what would he have been like into old age, right? Or I was haunted by what would my life be like if I had not lost him

[00:53:30] as a teenager. But I loved him and I cared about him. Him and my mother were very loving and affectionate and caring toward me. And so the film captured some of that. Our parents are flawed and that's what Estrella has to confront, especially as she gets older, is that your parents can be deeply flawed people. They had a history before you. They have their own lives, their own

[00:53:59] torments and wounds. They have things that haunt them just as we have things that haunt us. They had their own childhood that they will look back on and that they have to carry with them. It's invisible. And I like the pendulum. I think the pendulum is such an interesting tool in the film because it's about finding something that is invisible at first, that's unseen, that's below the surface of the earth.

[00:54:29] Something that you can't see with the naked eye, but it's something that you feel. The pendulum apparently is picking up on something in the film and the pendulum guides you to the water and the earth. And in a way, that's how I see the book by Adelaide. Or you could even say that the narrator of the book is doing something similar through her writing. She's digging down into the depths of her history,

[00:54:59] of her past with the pen, with words, with writing, trying to find something, right? She's searching through her writing for something mysterious, something unseen, trying to find those emotions, those feelings, those things that will help her understand the past and her father. The pendulum is used to find water beneath the earth, and the narrator in the book is trying to connect to her father, connect to the

[00:55:28] past through writing, trying to find what's buried, and she's bringing up these memories, bringing up the life and death of her father. The pendulum connects to these unseen forces. Even her connection to her father is an unseen force, right? Like our connection to the dead and the way that they act upon our lives. Even though he's dead, he remains present with her. You can't see the dead anymore.

[00:55:57] They're not there with you, but you feel them. They're this thing under the surface. And I think it's worth noting that Estrella talks about her memories of her mother are not as vivid or clear, even though she spent the vast majority of her time with her mother. And I think that happens for a lot of us with our parents. The mother tends to be taken for granted. She's always there in the background. Estrella talks about her mother sewing dresses,

[00:56:27] taking care of flowers in the greenhouse, putting varnish on furniture, reading novels. She's this steady, reliable presence. She becomes almost invisible as a result. But the father is more special at that time when she's around seven. The father's more special to Estrella because her contact with him is more limited and rare. So he remains on this pedestal

[00:56:56] in a way. He remains magical and special. But by the time she's a teen and she sees the alcoholism, she sees the disintegration, I think she's able to see the reality of him more. And that can be devastating. That process of taking a parent off of a pedestal, the process of understanding that our parents were not super human. I think there's also something interesting that as you reach the age that your

[00:57:26] parents were at when you were a child, there's something incredibly unsettling about it almost. I think about when my mother was 36, the age that I am now, and I was like in elementary school. She had my father, she had me, you know, her life was totally different than my life is at 36. She still had both of her parents when she was my age, and I'm totally alone, and I don't have my parents,

[00:57:56] and I'm not that far from my father's age when he died, because he died when he was 45. I realized like, oh my god, my parents were this age, and they were raising me, and I don't even feel like an adult really, and I realized like, god, they were groping in the darkness too. Like, they were flawed, they were scared, they were struggling. I feel their fragility and their frailty in a way. Augustine

[00:58:25] is this lost and tormented soul. I think that comes through the film. He's really battling his own demons, and those demons will directly impact Astraea, and particularly the protagonist of the book. Like I said earlier, we feel the ramifications of his death more deeply for her, and his demons will affect Astraea because he kills himself, and then she has to carry the grief,

[00:58:55] the void, the absence, the pain of that. And we are impacted by our parents' lives. We are impacted by their wounds, by their demons, by what haunts them, what torments them. That can manifest in our own lives, can't it? And maybe in a way that's what Astraea is trying to understand. When she looks at Irene Rios, when she wants to go to the South, she wants to understand what did

[00:59:25] this to my father, what put this sorrow in him that then made him go and pick up that gun and end his life and take and abandon her and remove himself from her life, and now she has to live with his absence. I think that's part of why she wants to make that journey. She wants to understand what acted on him, what happened to this man, to make

[00:59:54] him drink the way that he does, to make him so obsessed with Irene Rios, to make him end his own life. What could have possibly done this to him? Because what touched Augustine touches her too. It's interesting because our parents are separate from us, but we are also touched by their pain, even if they try to hide it from us, even if they think that they are hiding it from us. Usually they're

[01:00:24] not. Usually it manifests in some way. To me, the father is a very dark and troubled figure, and I felt this most powerfully at the communion. There's this scene at the church where he's in the back, and he's standing, like, in the dark, and he emerges from the shadows, and there is something about that scene as I have watched the film, and she goes to him and she asks him not to leave.

[01:00:54] She says, don't leave, even if you get tired. He's this elusive figure to her, and I think she's always trying to grasp him and to hold on to him. And I felt like as I was reading the book as well that it was the story of a woman trying to grab hold of a ghost, trying to grab this ghost, this phantom, and I felt that when he emerged from the shadows of the church. There's something so, I don't know, there was something about that that

[01:01:24] affected me, and in a way I feel like maybe that's what I've tried to do throughout my life. Like I said, I don't know if I've tried to decipher my father or understand everything about him, but I do feel like maybe I've always been trying to grasp at that ghost that he became. There's just something very melancholy about Augustine, and when he's at the communion, when he's at the church, and he comes out of those shadows,

[01:01:53] she wants to hold on to him and grab on to him. She doesn't want him to leave, and he's always kind of outside of her grasp, and she can't fully get a hold of him, can she? And of course they dance together at the communion. It's such a beautiful moment between the two of them. There are many beautiful moments, between the two of them. You know, when they're together and doing the stuff with the pendulum, when they're dancing at her communion, and I have my own memories,

[01:02:23] my own beautiful memories of my father, but shortly after that communion is when she finds out about this other woman, about Irene Rios, also named Laura, where she realizes she's not just sharing her father with her mother, she's also sharing him with this other woman and trying to keep that woman a secret from her mother. She becomes complicit in that, but the mother knows about Irene Rios.

[01:02:53] She's always known. And this is what starts to crack the myth of Augustine, is when she finds out about this woman. And she realizes that her father is unknowable to her, that he has a double life or a secret life with this actress that he's in love with. Something changes in her, and she says that in the film. It changes how she views him, and she realizes she doesn't really know him

[01:03:23] at all. And this is like, I almost see it as a moment of losing her innocence in childhood. It opens her eyes, and she sees him in a different way. There's the same later in the film where she's hiding under the bed. There's these interesting moments with the father. Sometimes they're so tender, like dancing or him showing her the pendulum, and then at other times they're darker, him emerging from the shadows of the church,

[01:03:52] and then him there in the room with her as she's hiding under the bed. And her hiding under the bed is this moment of rebellion and protest. She says that. He answers her silence with his own. He comes home, and she's been under the bed all day. She's been in the darkness, in the shadows. It's such a shadowy film. That's why I think it was perfect that he chose Rembrandt and Caravaggio for the artistic inspiration. The film captures

[01:04:22] the shadows. Augustine is a shadowy figure, and then the daughter is claimed by some of this darkness and lives in the shadows herself, at least in the scene under the bed. He answers her silence with his own. And she said that he wanted to show that his pain was greater than hers. And I think what moved me the most about this scene, it's such an important moment in the film,

[01:04:51] is that she's waiting for him. She's waiting for him to call out to her, to reach for her, to reach toward her, and he won't do it. There's so much love for her father when she's a child, but like I said, there's also this gradual realization that he is haunted by his own pain and tormented by his own demons. And he wants to show or prove that his pain is greater than hers.

[01:05:20] And I found that to be very moving. And just the whole scene of this girl, this little girl waiting for her father to come and find her and he won't do it. The pain of that, like what that does to you, not just what his death does to her, but in these interactions with him where he will not go toward her, he will not save her, he will not reach for her, and she's trying to

[01:05:50] make him stay, make him care, but she never can fully pin him down. And Augustine, certain parts of him reminded me of my own father. Not literally, they're not exactly the same. All of us have, you know, complicated parents, don't we? And like I said, my father was introverted and shy, and he was more within himself. He was more trapped

[01:06:19] inside himself, I would say. And particularly in his last years, he was in a lot of pain because he was having health issues, and he was disabled. And I watched his body deteriorate, and I watched him suffer through that, and that was devastating. He retreated into himself, and I felt like I couldn't fully reach him because he was in his own pain.

[01:06:49] He was struggling, his health was going downhill, he was scared. Like, the thing about it is that I feel very haunted right now by my parents' suffering, by my parents' pain, by what my father went through with his help in his final years, and then, of course, my mother dying of cancer in hospice, and I took care of her. The diagnosis was very shocking, and she was gone very quickly,

[01:07:18] and I feel their pain. And as I get older, I realize how scared he must have been, and how that period of my life, my mother must have been scared as well, to watch her husband suffering with health issues, and not having resources, and not having support from their own family, not having a community to lean on, feeling abandoned by other people, because his siblings were

[01:07:48] not there for him, his family wasn't there, my mother's family wasn't there. Like I said, it was just me, my mom, and him, the three musketeers, and we only had each other, but he was in pain. He was not saved. This world harmed my parents because of our healthcare system, and because of when you're disabled, when you have health issues, it is very hard to get help in this country, in this healthcare system, if you don't have a lot of money. We were

[01:08:17] working class, so my parents were not saved, my parents were not helped in their time of need, and I'm often haunted by not being able to save him, just as Estrella suffers from guilt that she couldn't save her own father, and I think it's why when my mother was dying in hospice, I did everything I could to take care of her. I did everything I could to protect her, to make sure that she did not die alone, and she did not die in pain.

[01:08:47] That was very important to me, because I felt like, in a way, I couldn't save my father. I couldn't take away my father's pain, or prevent some of the suffering that he went through, but I felt like with my mother, I had the chance to try to reduce her suffering as much as possible in her final weeks, and I did that. I did everything I could for her. I gave everything I could to her, because I was also her

[01:09:17] for the five years, for about five and a half years before she died. I just often have wished I could save my father. I could go back and change it or do something, but I was a child. I was a teenager, and so I hurt for him in a different way. I carry my parents' pain. I carry their suffering, and I feel like Astraea carries her father's suffering. I think she

[01:09:46] will carry, and this is more prevalent, or this is more clear in the book, that she could not save her father. She couldn't change it. But my father was in pain in his final years, and he was within himself. He was struggling, right? He was carrying a lot. He didn't have the help that he needed, or the support, or the resources. And I just often wish that I could change that, and I can't. But I know that

[01:10:16] I did everything to take care of my mother, and I know that he would have wanted me to do that. He would have wanted me to care for her, and to be by her side, and I was by her side. I was there when she died, when she breathed for the final time. I was beside her, and when my father died, I wasn't with him. I wasn't in the room with him. And so in some ways, my mother's death, I guess I have more peace around her death, because

[01:10:45] I was active in caring for her, and felt like I had some kind of power or control, at least in that regard. Whereas with my father's death, I was a teenager, I was a child, I felt so powerless. My father was a good man, and he did the best that he could, but he had a lot of pain that he carried. And I think that's one of the things that haunted me for a long time. And I guess it

[01:11:15] still does, even though I'm trying to find a way to bear that. When Estrella is a teenager, her relationship with Augustine is different. And you can tell that she sees him differently. And by that point, he's disintegrating. He's really deteriorating. His alcoholism has intensified. He drinks a lot. He becomes even more remote from her, even more distant, even more unknowable.

[01:11:45] And there's the very powerful scene near the end of the film at the Grand Hotel. It's such a powerful scene for Estrella because it's the last time that she speaks to her father. And at the Grand Hotel, there's a wedding happening in the next room. And I see this scene as a kind of culmination of the film a bit and like a confrontation between father and daughter. She asks him two questions.

[01:12:15] She asks him why he's drinking so much and he doesn't really answer it. He feels judged. Then she asks about Irene Rios and he lies and says he didn't know her. He withholds that truth from Estrella. Right? I mean, we know that he's obviously very in love with this woman or pining after her. So it's kind of a confrontation where she outright asks him these questions. But he remains elusive.

[01:12:45] He remains an enigma. Right? He won't answer. He withholds that from her. And there's this music playing at the wedding that was the same music that was played during the dance at her communion all those years before. When she was a little girl, it was the 1940s. By this time, she's a teenager. It's the mid-1950s. And he remembers the dance. He mentions it to her. This scene

[01:13:15] makes me very emotional. There's this tenderness in it. And there's heartbreak in it as well. He remembers that dance with Estrella. And yet we know he can remember that dance. And then he still goes and kills himself after that meeting. We don't know how long after the Grand Hotel he kills himself. I don't know if it's exactly mentioned,

[01:13:45] but we know that's the last time she sees him, the last time she talks to him. You can tell that he has a fondness for Estrella, that he loves her, and he still does this unspeakable act that will deeply wound her. And there's something so poignant when she's walking out of the Grand Hotel and she says that she leaves him there. She leaves him by the window alone. And she says, quote, could I have done more for

[01:14:13] him than what I did at that moment? Unquote. That's a question that seems to haunt her because she admits that she's always asked herself what more she could have done for him, but what could she have done? Right? There's nothing she could have done. They're sitting together at lunch, but they're a world away from each other. In a way, with Augustine, he's chosen his darkness. He's chosen his demons over his daughter and his wife.

[01:14:43] He's chosen to be claimed by the things that haunt him. And isn't, in a way, Augustine, a kind of warning to us that when we are so haunted and consumed by the past, by whatever happened to us, whatever wounded us, that we can be claimed by that force. We can be claimed by the vortex, claimed by the void, because something is haunting

[01:15:12] this man. Something has destroyed a part of him to the point where he doesn't want to go on living, and he is not able to connect to life, to his daughter, to his wife, to other people. He's always in the shadows. He's always separate. He's always tormented. She talks about her diary and his crises and all of the stuff that was always happening when she was a

[01:15:42] teenager and how she wrote it down and she just accepted it as part of her life. He's claimed by whatever has a grip on him, and she wants to understand what that was. That's why she makes that journey to the South. She wants to understand what he was so consumed by. Why the melancholy? Why the sorrow? Why the pain? What's the source of it? What's the origin?

[01:16:12] Why did he go into that field and shoot himself? But she'll never fully understand it. And I had a moment with my father similar to the Grand Hotel scene. I won't go into specifics or details about it because obviously that's very private and sacred to me, but it was shortly before he died, and I've always wondered if he had some kind of premonition about what was going to happen to him, what he knew was coming,

[01:16:41] if he sensed it in some way. When I say that this film gave me many gifts, I had not thought about this memory or this moment with my father before he died in a very long time, but I almost feel like the film was leading me back to it for a reason because it's a moment of profound love, actually. It's different than the grand hotel moment, but it's similar

[01:17:10] because it's one of the last times that I had this intense kind of connection with my father, and it was shortly before he died, and there was something very haunting about it and about him, but it was also a very loving moment. It reminded me of the love he gave me, and the life that I shared with him, the too brief life. It was this moment that me and him shared.

[01:17:40] I just hadn't thought about it for a very long time, and then there it was, and I was thinking about it, and I was crying and weeping when I thought about this experience with my father, and it was almost like he was trying to transmit a particular message to me through that memory, through what he said to me when we were talking, and I just remembered how much

[01:18:09] he loved me. That's what I want to connect to going forward, is the love that my mother and father gave me. I feel their pain, and I suffer for them, and I hurt for them, but going forward, I'm trying so hard to remember their lives, to honor their lives, and to carry the love that they gave me. I think that is

[01:18:39] what will help me live in this world without them, and so the film reconnected me to my father. It reconnected me to his life, and to the love between us, the good memories before the suffering, the pain, and the horror of his death. It reconnected me to those special moments. It reminded me of his presence and his love,

[01:19:08] and maybe in a way the film gave me back a part of my life in the process. It was this reunion that I had, a reunion between different versions of me, you know, a reunion with the teenager I was, with the little girl I was, right, with the younger self. This reunion between me and my childhood, but also reunion between me and my father, me and my parents when I was a little girl,

[01:19:38] and I see my childhood so differently now that both of them are calm. His death cast such a shadow over my life, like I've said at the beginning, and I guess I'm trying to walk out of that shadow now, to walk out of it, and to walk toward the light, and walk toward life, and that's what this film connected me with. It's a painful film. It's about a painful relationship

[01:20:07] with a parent. I'm not going to deny that. When she loses Augustine in that way, and the pain of that, and the distance between them, and her not understanding him, it's a painful relationship between a father and daughter. Whereas my relationship with my father was not as painful, right? But she still loves Augustine. Even though she's wounded by what he did and wounded by his death,

[01:20:37] the love is there too. That's what I guess the film connected me with the most, was the love. And it's like I stepped back in time, stepped back into that golden light of childhood, to that time that's forever gone, but still so alive to me in my mind. It's like it's suspended in resin, right? And I can't live there. It's in my mind, and I think about it,

[01:21:07] but I can't live there, and I can't live in that shadow anymore. I can't live in that haunting. I can't live in that darkness and that absence and that void, because I built my life around that void. God, I really did. I built my life around that void, and I can't do it anymore. I think that's what the film showed me. And Estrella goes to the south. It's interesting because the

[01:21:36] end of the film is really the beginning of her next journey, which is to go see her family, to go see Augustine's family in the south, and we don't follow her there. And I agree that I like that we don't go with her. I like that we don't get a bunch of neat answers about Augustine. I like that there's no bow placed at the end of the film of, well, here's why he did everything. Here are

[01:22:06] all the answers. Maybe it's better to let him be in the shadows. Maybe it's better to not know everything and to keep him in that mystery and to just imagine that journey for her and what she may find. And maybe it's more about what she finds in herself and not just what she finds out about her father. But I like the idea of just leaving it at that. I think

[01:22:36] that works really perfectly. There's no bow placed on the end of the film. Here's all the answers. Here's closure closure. Because these wounds don't heal and we don't really get closure. Would it matter what she found out about him? Would it really matter to know the answers to all the questions? To find out, well, this is what happened when he was a child. This is what happened with his father. Even if you had all the answers, would it matter?

[01:23:05] Would it really explain why he ends up in that marsh with the gun? why he left her? No. Even when we think we're going to get closure, even when we think we're going to get the answers, does it ever really make sense? Do we ever really get closure? Do we ever really come to terms with the past or make peace with the past? I do know this, that his death did

[01:23:35] make me who I am. And it came with pain and it came with self destruction. But it also made me empathetic. It made me deep. It made me compassionate. It made me understand how fragile life is. And I believe that it shaped me into the woman who could sit by my mother as she died and take care of her. And I cared for her for over five years.

[01:24:05] And I wonder, you know, what do we do with absence? absence? The film is shaped by an absence, isn't it? And I wonder, is there a way to take the haunting and to turn it into something else? To turn it maybe into devotion? But instead of being obsessed with the dead, can we be devoted to the dead? And what I mean by that is that being devoted to the dead can also mean being

[01:24:34] devoted to life. because when we honor the dead and we acknowledge them and we hold them inside ourselves and remember them, we have a deeper understanding of life, of the sanctity and sacredness of life. I believe his death gave that to me, that I understood the stakes. I understood how serious life is. I understood that everything we love can

[01:25:04] be taken away. And so we have to love deeply. I know what it's like to lose something precious, something that should be cherished. I can't have the bodies of my parents, but I have my memories. I can't cherish their physical beings, but I can cherish my memories of the life that I had with them. And I know I said for a long time I didn't know how to live, but I did my best to live, and I will continue to do my

[01:25:34] best to live. And I know that the grief came from a place of love, and it still does. It's not just his death that but what I'm trying to connect to is that it's not just his death that shaped me. His love shaped me too, and that's what I want to remember. I want to remember his life. I want to remember my mother's life. I want to remember the life I had with my parents. I lived so long with the void and the absence. It became so monumental,

[01:26:04] so enormous, but the love is there too. Their love shaped me. They were good people. They were wonderful parents. They were not perfect, nobody is, but they were loving and caring and good, and they did the best they could in this world, and they were not often treated the way that they should have been treated, and I didn't know how to live with the death, but now I have to live. I have to find a way to live,

[01:26:33] and that's what this film gave me. It's not just an understanding of what his absence did and what his death did, but it reminded me and reconnected me to his life and to the love he gave me, to the life I shared with my parents and the love both of them gave me, and I will do my best to continue to honor them and to not

[01:27:03] let their deaths completely overshadow that life that we shared together, that I am the only survivor of, that I am the only one now who remembers it and can bear witness to it, and that's what this film reminded me of. It was this reunion. It's just such a special film, and it touches my soul. So I thank you so much for listening. I know I went on a while,

[01:27:32] and if anybody listened to the end, I appreciate it. Until next time, keep watching great films.