In light of the global pandemic, Cinema Tropical is committed to create new and flexible initiatives to provide meaningful, relevant, and inspiring content during these adverse times. As numerous filmmakers and platforms are making available content online during the emergency, we're starting a new section in our TropicalFRONT blog recommending a different film per day to watch for free online.
Winner of the Cinema Tropical Award for Best U.S. Latinx Film, Cecilia Aldarondo’s debut documentary feature Memories of a Penitent Heart, is a documentary that cracks open a Pandora’s box of unresolved family drama, combining a wealth of newly discovered home movies, video, and written documents with artfully shot contemporary interviews and vérité footage,
Originating from filmmaker Aldarondo’s suspicion that there was something ugly in her family’s past, the film charts her excavation of the buried family conflict around her uncle Miguel’s death, and her search for Miguel’s partner Robert a generation later. After two years of dead ends, Robert turns up: but he is not the same man. He has reinvented himself as Father Aquin, a Franciscan monk with 25 years of pent-up grief and bitterness.
For the first time, a member of Miguel’s family wants to hear Aquin’s side of the story—but is it too little, too late? A story about the mistakes of the past and the second chances of the present, Memories of a Penitent Heart is a cautionary tale about the unresolved conflicts wrought by AIDS, and a nuanced exploration of how faith is used and abused in times of crisis.
MEMORIES OF A PENITENT HEART
A film by Cecilia Aldarondo
(Puerto Rico/United States, 2016, 72 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Click here to watch the film for free
Watch the trailer:
