“Prodigal Daughter” opens the SF Latino Film Festival

At 25, Mabel Valdiviezo packed up her life and left her family and her country behind. She felt misunderstood by her working-class family and, amid violent political repression in Peru, she fled to the United States in 1993. Sixteen years later, she returned to Lima – this time with a video camera and a desire to reconnect with her estranged family.

The footage she took on this trip would eventually become a documentary Lost daughter, which will open the Latino Film Festival in San Francisco on October 11th. Combining difficult family conversations with mixed media art, Valdiviezo's autobiographical film depicts a daughter's reckoning with a home that rejected her because she felt it had rejected her first.

Lea is a story in Spanish.

“I tried to train as a filmmaker to make art,” Valdiviezo told El Tecolote. In Peru, she was part of the burgeoning punk “subte” scene, but her identity sometimes got in the way of her ambitions. “There have always been enormous hurdles, not only because I am a woman, but also because of my social class.”

However, becoming an artist in San Francisco came with its own challenges. Valdiviezo was among 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in the country after overstaying her tourist visa. Unable to pursue mainstream work, Valdiviezo said she worked as a stripper in the city to make ends meet and struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. “I had a lot of ideas about being in control, but in reality that wasn’t the case,” she said. “It’s not you who is in control, it’s the exploitation system.”

Her complicated past, both in Peru and San Francisco, made it all the more difficult to finally decide to reach out to her family when she finally received her green card in 2009 after more than a decade of silence.

“Alienation is complex,” Valdiviezo said. “What impressed me most [when reuniting] I felt like they felt my absence with pain and shame.”

One of the film's central storylines is Valdiviezo's strained relationship with her mother Bila and the healing process that occurred. Part of the tension arose when Bila learned of her daughter's experiences in San Francisco and felt judged and hurt that Valdiviezo had left her family behind.

“You left so young and we knew nothing about you,” Valdiviezo’s mother says in the documentary. “Could you have died? I knew nothing.”

Manufacturing Lost daughter and healing those familial wounds, Valdiviezo said, is “an odyssey.” The process spanned 15 years, during which she documented several trips to Lima and filmed conversations with her family. She recorded from 2009 to 2016 and spent several years bringing together the film's layers of mixed media art, all on a shoestring budget supported by a grant from the city.

This year, Valdiviezo's documentary premiered at the Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival. Some of her family members traveled to LA for the screening, which made the event extra special for her, she said. Among them was Bila, whose art is also featured in the film.

“At the end of the day, my mom really understands where I am in my journey,” Valdiviezo said. “And it’s interesting because we have very different perspectives on life.”

Although Lost daughter is deeply personal, Valdiviezo said the broader themes of immigration, gender, mental illness and family have resonated with many Latinx families who have attended its various festival screenings.

“There were a few people under 30 who came up to me and talked to me about the impact the film had on their own experiences in relationships with their parents,” she said. “Even people my age came and said, 'It helps me understand and relate to my teenage child.'”

Valdiviezo hopes her film also creates space for more nuanced discussions about the undocumented immigrant experience and its impact on mental health.

“There's a narrative out there that I think is dissolving, but it was about: Let's just tell the stories of the good immigrants, the deserving immigrants, and if we tell those stories, then we're in a better position with that.” mainstream Americans understand us because we are like them,” Valdiviezo said. “But we are human beings, we are all very complicated, and so for me it is neither a good nor a bad immigrant. It's in between. It’s a complex narrative.”

Lost daughter will screen at the SF Latino Film Festival on October 11 at 6:30 p.m. at the Roxie Theater, with a second screening on November 2 at 2 p.m. at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. For tickets and more information about these and other festival screenings, visit cinemassf.org.