Letters to My Dead Parents

Almost anyone who has lost their parents will be familiar with the desire to talk to them again. In Letters to My Dead Parents, Ignacio Agüero shows what he would discuss with his mother and father who died long ago.

In this meandering, associative film, Agüero weaves together home movies, family photographs and interviews with people who knew his father, including a union leader who worked in the factory where he was a manager. These are intercut with footage of Pinochet’s coup and dictatorship, as well as excerpts from Agüero’s own short protest film No Olvidar (Don’t Forget, 1982).

Set against this past are present-day images of Agüero’s home and idyllic garden, their beauty contrasting with the horrific memories of the dictatorship. He wonders what his father would have thought of the coup had he been alive—he died three years earlier. A note of shame emerges as Agüero reflects on his own response at the time: while a friend of his was murdered, he shut out the brutal reality by immersing himself in film school.