Memories of a Penitent Heart by Cecilia Aldarondo (review)

Memories of a Penitent Heart is a personal documentary produced, directed, and written by Puerto Rican-born filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo. This is her first feature-length film: 72 minutes long, in English and Spanish with English subtitles. It is about her quest to find out who really was Miguel Dieppa, her gay uncle, who died when she was only 6 years old. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.

Miguel Dieppa left the island for New York City at some point in the 1970s, lived there, and died in 1987. His relocation was not conflict-free; saved family letters reveal a man haunted by religious beliefs from his upbringing, who was at times alienated from his own relatives—especially his fanatical Catholic mother, Carmen (Aldarondo's grandmother)—and, to a lesser degree, his sister Nilda, Aldarondo's own mother. In the end, the documentary becomes the symbolic exhumation and complication of Aldarondo's uncle.

"[M]ás nunca yo hubiera pensado en sacar … un … un … Una cosita que pudiera mancillar la familia. Yo no lo haría …," are the very first lines heard in this film, a stern warning uttered by Titi, a family's female friend, commanding Aldarondo to stay away from digging up family secrets. Aldarondo ignores Titi's admonition and actively takes the audience on her quest for the real Miguel Dieppa, rhetorically asking, "If we only remember the good things about people we love, what do we lose?"

If Aldarondo were to rely on the official version of family history her grandparents wanted to remember—Carmen's embellished scrapbooks and grainy images from 8-millimeter home movies, the Dieppa's past would be a rosy, perfect one: family gatherings, happy outings, angelical smiling children, gorgeously dressed women, well-behaved people. Examining other material—old family photos and slides, and letters—and asking her mother and family friends makes Aldarondo aware that there was more to her uncle's story. Did he really die of cancer or of AIDS? Did he really repent for his homosexuality on his deathbed, or did Carmen push him and/or fantasize it? Who was and what happened to his partner, who disappeared after Miguel died? Miguel is gone, and so are his parents. There are a few friends of Carmen, who characterize her as a santa, and wholeheartedly stick to the Dieppa official narrative; Nilda only remembers Miguel's lover's first name. Aldarondo faces a dead end.

If it were not for Aldarondo's efforts to get to the bottom of the story, Miguel's death would be remembered through the sanitized version. Nonetheless, in her detective-like approach, she eventually finds Robert, who was Miguel's lover, who is now a Franciscan priest, whose name is now Aquín; he still cherishes Miguel's memory, and has saved every Miguel-related document he could; he remains pained by Miguel's family rejection and the marginalization he endured during his illness and death, welcoming the opportunity to give Aldarondo his side of the story. She also meets a group of Miguel's friends from when he lived in New York City whose interviews speak of a very different person from the family portrait, and for whom he was Michael, not Miguel.

Aldarondo does her own voice-over narration—blending in the voices of family members and other informants—making the documentary a distinctly personal and compelling story. The viewer never gets to see her face, however, and, although Aldarondo claims ownership of her voice through the use of personal pronouns, she remains a disembodied narrator. She does include her own complicated feelings and thought process in her narration.

Why is it important to tell the story of a young Puerto Rican gay man, a casualty of the AIDS epidemic, almost thirty years after his death? The film effectively evokes the 1980s, when so many precious lives—many of them people of color—were lost, the grief exacerbated by moralistic religious discourse, the stigmatization of the sick, and homophobic...