Recuerdos (Remembrance)

When Mexican filmmaker Marcela Arteaga first heard the story of the enigmatic Luis Frank, she knew she wanted to make a film about him: born a Lithuanian Jew, he grew up in New York, spent his formative years fighting as a partisan in the Spanish Civil War, was captured by the Nazis in France, survived Auschwitz, and finally settled in Mexico, which became as close to a home as this lifelong exile experienced. But Arteaga’s exquisite and lyrical film is far from a straightforward biography -- rather, she takes Frank’s restless and eventful life as a template for exploring the ruptures inflicted by the 20th century. The voices and memories of people scattered across the world whose lives overlapped Frank’s -- from Spain to France to Poland -- create a haunting kaleidoscope of remembrance. Their stories, intercut with ravishing landscapes and poetic imagery rarely achieved with such subtlety in documentary, are testimony to a century of migration, rootlessness, and the universal longing for home. Gradually, a picture emerges not only of the archetypal and mysterious Luis Frank, but also of a generation of disrupted lives coping with the inescapable persistence, pain, and joy of memory.

She began her studies in 1987 where she specialized in film direction. On the other side of the sea, her thesis film received awards at the NY International Student Film Festival, the Cancun Film Festival and a special mention at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Professionally, she has collaborated on projects of filmmakers Carlos Carrera, Maria Novaro, Jose Luis Garcia Agraz. The Remembrance project receives support from the Rockefeller Foundatoin in 1998 and is selected for production by the CCC's Opera Prima Production Fund.