All Water Has a Perfect Memory

Director Natalia Almada's 2002 Tribeca Film Festival award-winning “Best Short” documentary explores the effects on the family of her two-year-old sister Ana Lynn Almada's accidental drowning in Mexico when the filmmaker was only seven months old. Voiceover recollections by her brother and American mother (in English), and her Mexican father (in Spanish), reveal the family's differing emotional and cultural responses to the tragedy. The film's title is taken from an essay by Toni Morrison entitled “The Site of Memory,” in which Morrison suggests that water has memory and is “forever trying to get back to where it was”--a mournful reference that Almada supplements with impressionistic collages of aged photographs, Super-8 home movies of young Ana Lynn, and sundry images of the family swimming pool where she drowned. An evocative cinematic investigation of the ways an untimely tragedy can continually shape and reshape a family's collective memory, this is recommended for larger experimental film collections. Aud: C, P. (A. Cantú)