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Of Great Events and Ordinary People: Memories of a Penitent Heart

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Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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Of Great Events and Ordinary People

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Taking its title from that of a 1979 TV documentary by Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, Of Great Events and Ordinary People is a programme of two recent, acclaimed films, The House on Coco Road (Damani Baker, 2016) and Memories of a Penitent Heart (Cecilia Aldarondo, 2016).

Highly personal documentaries both, and featuring the potent use of an array of archival material, The House on Coco Road and Memories of a Penitent Heart focus on historically marginalised subjects from or in the Caribbean, in an attempt to illuminate previously hidden or untold narratives that intersected with some of the major events of the 1980s.

In Memories of a Penitent Heart, Cecilia Aldarondo excavates the buried conflict around her late uncle Miguel Dieppa, a playwright and actor from Puerto Rico. When Miguel died in New York in 1987 at the height of the AIDS crisis, he left behind a devout Catholic family and a long-term partner, Robert, who subsequently disappeared. Troubled by the incompleteness of the story of Miguel's tragically short life, Cecilia sets out to investigate his murky past, discovering painful family secrets as she does so.

This programme is presented in association with Third Horizon Caribbean Film Festival.

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