In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as ultra-rightists in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.
"Didy is everywhere”, says Gaël Kamilindi at the start of his film. And yet, the emptiness is immense. In order to fill this void, he sets off for Rwanda, accompanied by François-Xavier Destors, in search of his mother Didy, who died when he was five. Heartrending archival footage mingles with survivors’ memories to paint the portrait of this woman, thus setting in motion the process of mourning.
Ben arrives to his native Kibbutz and plans to ask his distant father Albert to help him recover a family apartment looted in WWII. But Albert has other plans... Completely drunk, he has bet that he could cross the country from north to south on a tractor in less than a week.
Oscar, 18 years old, is passionate about horse racing. At night, he dreams of winning horses and bets on them every day with success at the popular bar in his neighbourhood. When one evening he sees a former lover of his mother's, everything falls apart. The return of this man in his life causes Oscar a real emotional shock that brings back dark memories and tragically affects his premonitions.
With this new film, Felipe Monroy, a Colombian director living in Geneva, continues his work on the memory of his country. Back in Bogota after many years of absence, he starts revisiting his family’s past, tinged with a violence that echoes that of an entire nation. So, as the peace process then ongoing between FARC and government is perhaps about to turn the page after more than 50 years of war, the director starts his own effort at reconciliation, of which the film is both the instrument and the result. What can be done with poorly healed wounds? And what place can film take in this perilous exercise in forgiveness? It is simultaneously as son, brother, Colombian and filmmaker that Felipe Monroy tackles these questions and there lies the beauty of the film. It manages to look at the ghosts of the past straight in the eyes, adopting the contradictory sentiments that it provokes in its author and that it invites us to share.
