Memories of My Father Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Memories of My Father Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 11, 2023

Chances are if you were to mention the name of Colombia's second largest city to any number of random people, you'd get at least some responses adding "drug cartel" to "Medellín" perhaps almost automatically. While rampant crime (or at least violence, perhaps "officially sanctioned") does ultimately play into the bittersweet saga at the heart (literally and figuratively) of Memories of My Father, the film also does a sweetly satisfying job of showing a more mundane, if occasionally fraught, day to day existence of a loving family in that megalopolis. Memories of My Father was culled from a best selling memoir kind of interestingly called Oblivion written by Colombian novelist and journalist Héctor Abad Faciolince. Oblivion might be a somewhat more appropriate analog to this film's original Spanish title, El Olvido Que Seremos, which kind of ironically given the film's English title means Forgotten We Will Be. One way or the other, Faciolince's name may well be largely unknown up here in the United States, but his family was famous, maybe even infamous, in Colombia, due to the efforts of Faciolince's father, Héctor Abad Gómez.

Memories of My Father takes a rather interesting stylistic approach in that its supposedly "contemporary" sequences are in black and white, while those further back in time are delivered in rather ravishing color, as if to suggest that memories are indeed often viewed through rose colored glasses. Héctor Abad Faciolince (Juan Pablo Urrego) is introduced (in black and white) as a young student type in Italy who is called back to his native Colombia to attend a ceremony honoring his professor father, Héctor Abad Gómez (Pedro Almodóvar regular Javier Cámara). Gómez has reached the age of "compulsory retirement", something the still very active man may not completely appreciate, though it's obvious in his "goodbye" speech that Gómez himself has been deeply appreciated by his students.

The film then segues further back in time and into near Technicolor splendor as it recounts the childhood of Faciolince, who was called Quinquin (Nicolás Reyes Cano) as a little boy. Gómez is a prosperous doctor, though kind of interestingly, he's absolutely hard nosed about not letting his kids grow up with any sense of privilege, and in fact several key sequences in these "flashbacks" document the mentoring Gómez provides to Quinquin in terms of class consciousness and "doing the right thing" for those less advantaged.

Gómez's increasingly activist efforts ultimately lead to political ramifications, though it would probably be unfair to see Memories of My Father as any sort of a screed. In fact, the film's emphasis on a loving home life may make some of the more shocking aspects of this story even more visceral, but suffice it to say that the trauma inflicted on the family was so severe that it evidently took Faciolince several years before he was able to even try to write about it. While Memories of My Father might be accused of being too much of a hagiography for its own good, it's an extremely touching portrait of one man's honor and how that legacy has been handed down to his children.

Memories of My Father Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Memories of My Father is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.38:1. The making of featurettes included as supplements on this disc show Red cameras at several points, and the IMDb further specifies Red Monstro capturing at a source resolution of 8K, which leads me to believe this could well have had a 4K DI considering the generally resplendent detail levels on tap throughout the presentation. There's just a bit of what I assume is intentional haziness in some of the black and white footage, though this should not be over emphasized, as a lot of the monochrome imagery is sharp and very well detailed. That said, there's a near The Wizard of Oz quality when the film suddenly bursts into bright color, and it's in these sequences where things probably shine the most consistently. The palette is beautifully suffused and typically very natural looking, though a number of interior scenes in particular have a somewhat buttery yellow look. Detail levels and fine detail in particular benefit from some very brightly lit scenes as well as a prevalence of midrange and close up camera work.

Memories of My Father Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Memories of My Father features DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 tracks mostly in Spanish, but with a smattering of English and Italian thrown in here and there. The track is quite subtle most of the time, not offering a wealth of "showy" effects, but still establishing consistent immersion courtesy of both well placed ambient environmental sounds and Zbigniew Preisner's elegiac string drenched score. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. I had a brief, shining moment of hope when I saw this Cohen disc had a Subtitles option on the Main Menu, but at least on the disc sent to me, switching to "off" did nothing, and subtitles were still forced.

Memories of My Father Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Film Historian Annette Insdorf Interviews director Fernando Trueba and star Javier Camara (SD; 31:51) is a Zoom-like conversation and benefits from Insdorf's shaping of the discussion, though some may quibble with her assertion that since the death of Ennio Morricone, only this film's composer Zbigniew Preisner is "up to snuff" (um, John Williams, maybe?). In English.


• Making Of Featurettes feature good interviews with the principal cast and crew and are subtitled in English:

  The Actors (HD; 4:23)

  
  

  The Director (HD; 4:24)

  
  

  The Filming (HD; 4:28)

  
  

  The Book (HD; 4:12)

  
  

  The Production (HD; 4:17)

• Theatrical Trailer (HD; 2:19)

Memories of My Father Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This is a very sweet, often incredibly moving, story of one family in an increasingly precarious situation as time goes by, but a cohesive unit that manages to resiliently refuse to bow to the vagaries of fate or in fact the bad behavior of others. Technical merits are first rate, and this is the rare Cohen release with a few supplements to sweeten the pot. Maybe next time turning subtitles to "off" will actually work (that's a joke, kind of). Recommended.