Mantaray Film

The Promise

The 25-year-old filmmaker, Irene Lopez, lives with her boyfriend Samuel in Stockholm. She wants to have a good relationship and a normal life in Sweden but her past hunts her. When Irene's stepfather Carlos decides to divorce her mother to move back to El Salvador she feels angry, betrayed and lonely and decides go to look for her biological father who died in the war in El Salvador.

Irene has always compared her biological father-Roberto "the hero" to her stepfather Carlos- " the coward", but are all this stories about her father true? Was he really a war hero? Irene sets off to Central America to look for the truth.

As she is looking for the truth about her biological father she also finds the story of her mother. One of the first female guerrilla leaders in the war and she also finds out that her stepfather Carlos, ones made a promise to his best friend Roberto to take care of Irene if he would die, a promise that he actually kept.

The promise is about Irene Lopez and her struggle to understand her background and history. It is a story about absent fathers. About the choices her three parents had to make and how the logic of the war affects generations after generations. The story als portray an immigrant family's life in Sweden and the history of El Salvador since the revolution. A film filled with real heroes, promises, reconciliation and an answer to what it really means to be a family.

The film is based on old archive material, old personal voice recordings from Irene's parents, interviews and animations. The background story of her parents is woven in to Irenes personal journey. On the mural paintings in the streets of Cuba, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the history of the revolution is painted. When Irene watches them, the paintings come alive. These walls tell the stories of her three parents, but also the sad story of a continent and its tragic wars.

 

Production

Director: Irene Lopez
Producer: Stina Gardell / Mantaray Film

With support from the Swedish Film Institute, SVT and The Swedish Arts Grants Commmittee.

 

Information

Pitched at DocsBarcelona 2013.
Selected to Twelve for the Future by EDN 2010.
Release: Autum 2014.