It Runs in the Family

In It Runs in the Family, Victoria Linares Villegas offers a deeply intimate gesture: revisiting her own history in order to finally inhabit her identity with clarity and pride. What begins as a personal investigation quickly becomes a work of memory, but above all an act of repair in the face of an imposed forgetting.

The filmmaker does not simply tell a story: she implicates herself, stages herself, and doubles herself. Through a series of reenactments in which she plays her own uncle, she deliberately blurs the boundaries between herself and him, between present and past. This mirroring becomes central: the more she seeks to understand her cousin, Oscar Torres, the more she discovers herself, revealing unsettling correspondences between their trajectories and impulses.

The film fully embraces its formal device. Nothing is hidden; on the contrary, the process of making is exposed, almost asserted. This transparency gives the project a fragile dimension, where truth does not lie in raw facts—often absent—but in the very effort to reconstruct them. Faced with a lack of archives and the disappearance of traces, Linares Villegas chooses creation as a means of knowledge. She replaces absence with imagination, transforming the investigation into an artistic gesture.

In this way, the film becomes a living archive, a space where family history engages in dialogue with political history, marked by silences. By giving voice again to a queer and activist figure long marginalized, the filmmaker sheds light on what was deliberately silenced. She leaves behind a trace—not fixed, but shifting, shaped by doubt and subjectivity.

It is in this tension between memory and invention that the film finds its strength: making cinema not only a tool of transmission, but a place where one can finally exist again.

Miryam Charles
Filmmaker