Memories of My Father
Director: Fernando Trueba

“There are lads who don’t have a father,” a family friend tells Héctor, the disaffected twenty-something son of Colombian physician and human rights activist Héctor Abad Gómez. “Yet you have had too much of one.”

Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s adaptation of Héctor Abad Faciolince’s 2006 memoir of his father, Oblivion: A Memoir, explores what it is like to share a father with the urgent demands of a world beyond the family.

Although the film opens in black and white with foreshadowing scenes of graphic violence (in fact merely scenes from a gangster movie that student-age Héctor is watching at the cinema), it quickly moves to his boyhood in Medellín in 1971, taking the film into rich and life-enhancing colour.