“A full-bodied portrait of generations of pain and how to overcome it.”

Some trauma is generational. When the pain runs deep and is never talked about, it transitions from parent to child, and sometimes even further. In Gabriela Pena’s deeply personal portrait of three generations of pain, co-directed with her partner Picho García, the trauma is inflicted by a brutal dictatorship and leaves its marks still half a century later. Cleverly structured around the renovation of a family home, with Where the Silence is Heard Pena and García create a portrait of love marred by history, and how seeking closure is a necessity to prevent perpetuating the hurt.

In the mid-70s a family is forced to go into exile, fleeing Chile’s coastal city of Valparaíso to escape the long arm of Augusto Pinochet’s oppressive regime. A couple and their two young daughters settle halfway across the world, in Barcelona. But the damage has already been done. The father, a teacher and a communist, has survived a stint in Tres Álamos, the last prison camp for political prisoners of the dictatorship, but he doesn’t really talk about it. Nobody talks about it. “People had the will of not wanting to believe,” his wife recalls. One of their daughters, Andreita, has never returned to Chile, to that house on Templeman Street that now stands abandoned and in a dire state. But now her own daughter, Gabriela, goes back to Valparaíso, to clean up the old house and peel the wallpaper of her family’s history so she can finally find peace with the difficult relationship with her mother.

In conjunction with restoring her family home, Pena begins to interview her grandparents, who have returned to the city they had to flee in the dead of night five decades prior. Slowly but surely she pries loose the things that have been unspoken in the family for so many years, instigated by finding the unfinished memoirs of the two octogenarians in the dilapidated home. Stories of torture, of armed resistance, and of the camp. Pena is just in time, as her grandfather’s health is deteriorating. What she learns helps in figuring out her relationship with her mother, a woman whose life was dictated by the horrors that befell the family, which shaped her way of getting through life and her connection to Gabriela. It left a mark on Andreita, who laments, “Why haven’t I been able to be happy?“

García arrives at some point to help his partner fix up the house and forms an anchor for both Pena and the film. They mix interview-style conversations with old home videos and frequent resting points, in the form of well-composed still shots, to balance the intense drama that unfolds over the 90-minute runtime and not let the horrors of the past overwhelm the viewer. There are plenty of loving moments, and the old couple is delightfully endearing in their 60-plus years of devotion to each other. Flurries of cinematic poetry in the form of a flashlight illuminating dark stairways or the reflection of sunlight on the old wallpaper evoke a sense of ghosts still haunting the house, and water dripping from a hole in the roof is artfully turned into a metaphor of a tragic demise. This makes Where the Silence is Heard a film in which there is something to discover for everybody, from those interested in the human condition to people invested in Chile’s fraught history, and from cinephiles to those moved by a personal story of family drama. A hopeful and poignant ending, when the fourth generation presents itself, caps a full-bodied portrait of generations of pain and how to overcome it.