Relato Familiar
Sumie García
Mexico | 2017 | 20 min
World premiere
Languages : Spanish, Japanese
Subtitles : English, French
Yukio Saeki is 86 years old. He arrived in Mexico as a young man with a passionate love for photography. The film delves into Mr. Saeki’s memory and photographic archive. His story spins various threads, including Japanese immigration to Mexico, photographic technique development and the drastic changes and economic growth Mexico underwent from 1955 onward. Seeped in Saeki’s nostalgia, the film documents the entire life of a man who humbly admits, with self-deprecating wry humour, that after all the years spent in Mexico, he’s still can’t speak Spanish correctly. Behind his light-hearted nostalgia, though, looms a more eventful memory. The images of wartime Japan resurface in his memory and with them creep back also those of the fateful day when, walking towards the beach, he witnessed something falling from above on Hiroshima. The sky over the ocean went ablaze and the course of human history changed forever. That image has never abandoned Mr. Saeki. Like a photograph that one cannot erase or destroy. A filmic elegy to memory and pictures.
Giona A. Nazzaro
