The second long-film by Milagros Mumenthaler takes Guadalupe Gaona’s poetry book, Pozo de aire (2009), as the departure point, where the author dialogues verse and photography to sink in the wound caused by the vanishing of her father during the Argentinian military dictatorship. In La idea de un lago, Malena Moiron impersonates an artist, Inés, whose father was also a victim of vanishing and, about to be in labor to her first child, she completes the publishing of her own photobook. Inés relates to photography as the only way to puzzle a past that is slowly getting blurred and which has provoked a block not allowing her to navigate the bonds she’s built in the present with her partner, her mother and her brother. «Between them and I / there’s a well of air» (Gaona). Taken pictures are the only witness of the presence of a father vanishing from the memories at numerous fade-outs. Vanishing leaves wandering ghosts on the scene, and not physical bodies we may miss. Before the absence and the volatility of the memory, pictures are the only thing to rely on. Inés holds onto digitalized pictures that dehumanize her father, turning him into squared pixels and vivid colors when zooming in, in a failed attempt to getting close to him. Inés’ childhood tangles with the present at ups and downs of different textures and ways of taking the picture that complex the existence of a single linear tale. Memory becomes a forest where it has got dark and only those children who still remember can search with their lanterns, lightening the hidden bodies still resisting. Those places that where the scene of pictures, where her father’s body passed by and left his mark throughout the way, are now empty and lifeless scenes that become repetitive attempts to replace the backdrop where the event of his presence took place. LAURA BERMÚDEZ