TATTOOED (TATUADO) International Feature Competition

Director Eduardo Raspo’s (GEISHA) new film is filled with potent observations about lingering memories and unspoken mysteries between father and son, and the longing for the woman who left them behind.

Seventeen-year-old Paco, a boy on the brink of adulthood, struggles to accept the remarriage of his sweet but ineffectual father, and the newborn half sister with whom he tries to bond by giving her an Edward Scissorhands doll. Paco is obsessed with the one thing left to him by the mother he never knew: a tattoo of a mongoose on the boy’s forearm, a symbol of the Riki Tiki Tavi stories she must have read to him. But he doesn’t know what happened to his mother. Did she leave? Is she dead? Paco, and his runaway girlfriend Tero, set off in search of his mother’s roots. His reluctant father follows on this sometimes painful quest in an attempt to connect with his son.

Much of the film’s charm and quiet intensity come from the exceptional central performances, their authenticity adding additional layers of meaning. Eliciting these performances through his dreamlike direction, Raspo firmly establishes himself as a bright light in cinema and a passionately inventive filmmaker.