Gabinete Films

In 1983 a group of 154 children aged 3 and 17 years old traveled alone from Europe to Montevideo. They were children of political exiles from Uruguay, who were unable to come back to their own country; they sent their kids to know their relatives and home country. That human sign, charged with a political message, took part in children’s identity development. Nowadays, six of them still remember that day, when a crowd received them singing all together “your parents will come back”.

Inés travels to Kiruna, a town on the Swedish Arctic Circle, more than thirteen thousand kilometers from Uruguay. She revisits her past of exile captured in hundreds of handwritten letters, written between her and her father, imprisoned for 14 years. Letters in which they shared dreams and difficulties, fighting against absence, where writing and family became a bridge to be together, wherever.

Through 12 testimonies, the settlers of a small city tell their experience with a devastating tornado that struck them and devoured everything in its path, leaving a wound that remains capriciously and seeks for healing among so much rubble and lost history.

Villa Santo Domingo de Soriano was founded in 1624 by the first Europeans in the Banda Oriental (which is now Uruguay). This documentary re-discovers the settlement with a visit to its inhabitants and its houses, on the banks of the silent Rio Negro. The reality of this place is a reflection of a country's identity, as it tries to recover what it once was without giving up the will to prosper.