Years When I Was a Child Outside

This poetic, complex, yet also very sensitive and personal film, is both a diary and an essay as well as a test of competence. A quest for a form, not just to describe one’s own past, but also to give it purpose. An experiment in the true sense of the word.
The film is mainly about the relationship between the film maker and his father. That father, Rodolfo Torres, was a successful author and seller of self-help books, whose publishing empire collapsed at a certain point. After this disaster for the family, it also emerges that the father has another complete family with wife and children alongside his own family. This is the moment for the son to flee the house.
De film maker himself regards the film as a meditation, a travelogue about a quest with which he tries to create order in the chaos. The journey therefore begins against the background of the damage caused by a super typhoon in Manila.
The film is made up of a collage of various material that is held together by its personal tone and distinguishes itself from all those other films in which film makers look back on their own childhood thanks to its contemplative approach. The maker analyses his story and his narrative style from a distance, as it were. And that provides a strikingly paradoxical film that is very personal yet also very analytic. (GjZ)