Where the Silence is Heard
Gabriela Pena & Picho García / Chile & Spain / 2026 / World Premiere / 94 min
A young Chilean woman moves into an abandoned house in Valparaíso to piece together her family's history, which has been colored by dictatorship, exile, and silence for five decades.
A Chilean filmmaker arrives in the port city of Valparaíso to renovate the house her family had to leave behind when the dictatorship forced them into exile in Spain five decades earlier. Her hope is that by moving into the dilapidated house, she can delve into her family’s history and investigate the silence that has always surrounded it.
She talks on the phone with her mother, who still lives in Barcelona, and explores the tenderness between her grandparents, who have been married for 60 years and had to flee their Chilean home in the 1970s. And as the layers of wallpaper are stripped from the walls of the house, old memories and stories about the family’s past resurface.
‘Where the Silence is Heard’ is an aesthetically beautiful story about inherited trauma. An original cinematic exploration of memories, identity, and what love really consists of when it is shaped by fear and absence – driven by a single person’s burning desire to find peace before the next generation arrives.