Mexican writer-director Jimena Montemayor Loyo’s hauntingly atmospheric second feature stars the formidable Dolores Fonzi (also seen at the Festival in The Summit and The Future Ahead) as the matriarch of a family working through a torrent of grief and addiction.
In the wake of husband’s death, Carmen finds herself succumbing to alcohol and its promise of oblivion. Unable to either process her own grief or help her children through theirs, she tells her son and daughter that their father will return—an illusion heightened by the appearances of a strange creature.
Wind Traces wends through a labyrinth of magic and loss, handling overwhelming emotion with delicacy and intelligence and displaying an acute understanding of the sometimes spectral nature of childhood trauma.