María Silvia Esteve

A WhatsApp audio begins, and with it, a downward spiral unfolds. The voice of a woman sinking into a health anxiety attack, quickly entangles a complex labyrinth of fears and emotions. The Spiral is a dive into a lonely ride, an hypnotic escalation towards childhood, family, and the loneliness of “home”. Does home really feel like home?

In the depths of her mind, pain takes the form of a creature. A love relationship unleashes the obscurity within, to evoke in the real world, a world of shadows.

While telling her daughter a bedtime story, Mailin pieces her memories back together. What could have been a fairy tale turns out to be the story of a young girl who suffered abuse from a priest for 15 years. It’s a long journey towards healing and justice, but also the chance to offer her daughter the childhood she never had.

Silvia looks dazzling in the old VHS footage of her wedding in the early 1980s—she's a beautiful woman about to embark on a promising future with a diplomat husband, and a comfortable house to live in. The home videos that follow show more highlights from her life: her first wedding anniversary, her daughters growing up, and the farewell party at the embassy. Meanwhile, the audio commentary offers a very different reality. The film's director María Silvia Esteve is the middle one of Silvia's daughters, and she and her siblings talk about their parents' gradual descent into a spiral of angry clashes, psychological problems and prescription drugs. By recounting events from their childhood, they try to get a handle on what went wrong in their family. And they wonder why their mother, with whom they had a very close relationship, never managed to improve the situation or leave their father.