Seahorses

In the faded black-and-white images, the young Marcos embarks on a journey to find his father, a journey that intertwines reality and illusion. The director strips away the colors, using only the blood-red insects and plants to pierce the silence. He personifies memory as a solitary island, metaphorically representing the collective trauma caused by the absence of fatherhood. The stream-of-consciousness narrative breaks the shackles of time and space. Body language and sound therapy effects replace dialogue, and through the jumping camera shots, it dissects the wandering predicaments of the Odyssey generation – employment anxiety, identity confusion, and generational rifts. When Eastern Zen philosophy (the wisdom from the Diamond Sutra) collides with Western mythology (the archetype of Telemachus) on the island, what is mended is not just the father-son bond, but also the reconciliation between the self and the world. It is a silent drama that echoes in countless ways.