It comes to serve “A Place of Absence” well that its foundation initially seems removed from where it ends up, feeling a bit indirect when director Marialuisa Ernst joins the 12th Caravan of Mothers on their tour of Central America that becomes the film’s main thrust. Ernst no doubt found their way onto the bus full of mothers whose children have disappeared and likely kidnapped years ago because of what happened within their own family, their uncle Guillermo having vanished during the 1960s military dictatorship in Bolivia, but the filmmaker doesn’t insist on a personal connection immediately when their mother has shared little about Guillermo in the years since he’s been gone, his probable captors not only succeeding in taking him away from his loved ones but depriving him from living on in their memories when it’s too difficult to talk about.
There’s a more straightforward documentary Ernst could’ve made from following around the 12th Caravan, a movement that took inspiration from the famed protests of the Argentinean Madres of Plaza de Oro to demand justice for those disappeared during the Videla regime on the road as more and more teens in Central America are being abducted and absorbed into human smuggling chains. But instead, that just becomes one compelling strand of many in the film where time has a great deal of meaning as a present-day search for loved ones can commence due in part to advances in connectivity versus an era where relatives had little knowledge that their experience wasn’t an isolated one, yet it also has none at all when people become frozen in the moment that someone disappeared and the circumstances for it may change, but the feeling remains the same for those affected. Ernst experiences an opposite reaction from the mothers on the caravan that proudly wear their children’s pictures on their chest than their own, who has a few pictures of Guillermo tucked away but started a new life in Chile where a pursuit of an oncology degree and the responsibilities of being a mother to three left her little time to linger on the past. As the director explains, the experience of being on the bus leads to finally being a bit bolder in asking about his memory.
Ernst is a performance artist as well as a filmmaker, so “A Place of Absence” has poetic interludes tied to the forest that grows around their mother’s house, some of which work better than others relative to the verite footage they have from the caravan, but the approach to expressing both time and memory as it relates someone stolen from a life is genuinely inspired. A dialogue is extended from conversations with Ernst’s own mother, who isn’t reluctant to speak about Guillermo but at a true loss for words, to women she’ll never meet in Anita, a leader amongst the caravan whose son was thought to be coerced into a human smuggling ring, and Leti, who last heard from her daughter a decade earlier and can be seen urging girls her age to be careful where they walk alone during her travels as part of the caravan, when activism takes a variety of forms to keep someone’s spirit alive, occasionally requiring convincing oneself that it’s worth the effort as fervently as any public demand for attention. The formal conceit of having the cerebral experience that both Ernst and their mother have collide with the more tactile one that the 12th Caravan has as they travel, eventually coalescing and bringing together a fragmented narrative becomes an impressive way to create a presence for those who have gone missing, not only asserting their place on the record, but fleshing them out as more than statistics.
“A Place of Absence” will be available to stream on the DOC NYC virtual platform from November 16th through November 30th.