La Gorgona Historias Fugadas

It's the 16th of July Virgin del Carmen´s day, and Salomé, a beautiful 14-year-old girl, is celebrating the first anniversary of her beloved father’s death. While everybody is partying, her Grief contrasts with the festivity environment, forcing her to confront her pain, her own believes, her myths and even her most precious childhood memories and illusions to be able to understand imminent death and finally get some closure.

It is the year of grace of 1950. Ignacio (11) is celebrating his First Communion, a step that, according to catholics, puts him closer to God and opens up a space for him in the believers community. Communion implies, he will have enough grace to go to Paradise one day. It is also the day he is declared as a “conscious” person. However, from long time before, his tutor, sister Josefa, and the priest of the church, have said terrible things about his dead father, a communist that by now, as they say, should be burning in hell’s fire.

Filmed between 1945 and 1971, 16memorias tells the story of the Posada Saldarriaga, a Medellín family that grew up amid the euphoria of industrialization, the sugar mills sugar bowls, trips to Miami, sows and balloons. Twenty five years of almost uninterrupted daily life that they were about to get lost in an old house they give us the strange possibility of seeing our childhood for the first time; to recover brother's accomplice smile when we conquer kingdoms that no one else saw and felt how powerful we were every time we received applause from our parents. Searching the origin of adult life and recognizing the distance that separates us from those scenes wonderful, what seemed to be a cluster of forgotten images becomes the only evidence that remains to ensure that there was a time when we believed that all days were to be warm, simple, and blue.