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BEFORE MEMORY

ANTES DEL RECUERDO

By Joaquín GONZÁLEZ VAILLANT

Documentary - Post-Production 2024

Joaquín obsessively films their daughter Galia from her birth, trying to capture memories she cannot yet store. The recordings interfere with daily life, creating doubts and irritability. The lines between reality and what is constructed blur as their relationship falls.

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- URUGUAY
- Languages
- SPANISH
- Duration
- 70 mn
- Director(s)
- Joaquín GONZÁLEZ VAILLANT
- Producer(s)
- Agustina CHIARINO (BOCACHA FILMS), Joaquín GONZÁLEZ VAILLANT (JABALINA FILMS)
- Synopsis
- Joaquín and Carla have been a couple for some time and unexpectedly get pregnant. Joaquín is going to study for a master's degree in Barcelona, and they decide to go together and try "being a family. " Joaquín starts filming messages, like a video diary, for their future daughter, as a sort of window into the intimate universe of her parents in the times before, immediately surrounding, and after her birth. Galia is born, and Joaquín's compulsion to record everything intensifies. He becomes obsessed with preserving his daughter's "memories" before she develops the biological capacity to store them herself, around age four. This need begins to affect reality itself. The memories he
  tries to preserve start to be affected by the very act of recording them. The boundary between the real, the imagined, and the constructed becomes increasingly blurred. Everyone is more irritable, the couple starts to crack, Galia begins to react, and Joaquín starts devising increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to film without being seen, at times bordering on delirium.
  
  The pandemic strikes, the relationship with Carla further deteriorates, they separate, and in the midst of the separation, they find out another child is on the way. They decide to have the child. They try living together while being separated, but it doesn't work. Joaquín films messages to the future Galia, telling her how he feels and what he is going through in this emotional rollercoaster—it is an act of brutal honesty. He is consumed by guilt because family life does not seem to fulfill him; he has flashes of lucidity and moments of confusion and disorientation, with
  no middle ground.
  
  Carla and Joaquín do online couples therapy to try to heal the relationship and communicate. Tadeo is born. Now Galia takes the camera and begins to ask the questions.