Memory lives in images — images held by our memories, but also images that we create and that breathe new life into our memories. O Canto das Amapolas, the most recent work by Colombian-Brazilian Paula Gaitán, is an ode to her roots: to her mother, Dina Moscovici, to her past and to her story. The director puts moving images (filmed by herself) into dialogue with stills (photographs and stock footage), moving freely from one place to another, trying to create a tale from small pieces she rearranges again and again. Through black and white montage sequences that contrast with colourful oneiric moments, Gaitan dedicates herself to film presence as a ghost: in objects, in the environment, in voices —without ever showing the face behind them—. The reflection on language takes shape in the narratives, which oscillate between literary quotations, tales from the past and daily conversations with her mother, and in which the director finds the power of repetition as a mean to make the finite infinite: looping memories and the constant reconfiguration of the memory, like the repeated image of an open window and in front of it a seated woman who wasn’t there before. ‘I think I’ve told this story many times’, says Dina. This is the feat that Gaitán decides to undertake: to tell a story as many times as she can, in as many ways as she can, and to make it a new story with each telling. DANIELA URZOLA