Te extraño

In his film Argentinean director Fabián Hofman tells a story about coming of age in exile. The story centres on 15-year-old Javier who is forced by the political situation to leave Argentina and emigrate to Mexico; in the meantime, back home, his elder brother is killed: “They killed him when he was twenty and I was fifteen. But his death has always been an incomplete idea. My brother Adrián is neither dead nor alive. He disappeared in Buenos Aires in 1976, and that fact shaped my life.”
Adrián casts a shadow over Javier’s life, from which he struggles to free
himself. Fabián Hofman: “The character’s conflict lies in having to live the fate of his missing brother, being an absurd fugitive, having to emigrate to a place of which he knows nothing more than the name. The one who should have gone to Mexico was Adrián, the one that should have run away to save his neck, the one who should have survived; he had a vision about what to do in the world, he was the one who knew how to change it. He was brave; he really put his life on the line. He is the one everyone misses, the one who has left an unbridgeable vacuum in his family’s life. Adrián, who used to chew his fingernails, who had asthma, who made everyone laugh with his dark sense of humour. He had it in him to become the triumphant guerrilla commander that the people would love, he had charisma, he wasn’t me …”