The Wind and All Times

Years afterwards, director Carla Valencia Dávila rediscovers videos of a cycling trip she made through Uruguay in her youth. The shots of rolling highways, deserted hotels, and unexpected encounters set her thinking. It feels as if someone else had filmed them.

Some of the images she can’t remember, while others have taken on a whole new meaning in the light of her life experience. She reedits the video into a road movie traveling through her own memory, finds diary entries to go with the shots, and supplements them with family films, found footage, and Super 8 reels. The wind becomes a recurring motif, present in nearly all her videos.

With The Wind and All Times, she creates a journey through her own past and that of the continent that shaped her family. Her father left Chile as a young man—on a return visit during the dictatorship, he found a country he longer recognized. It turned out that as a teenager, her mother had the same traumatic experience as Carla would later have. With the help of seemingly coincidental footage, the filmmaker draws connections between her own story and that of her loved ones.