A Language Beyond Words

One month before my first film hit theaters, my father had a stroke.

I was in the middle of a Zoom meeting when I got that dreaded phone call. The kind of call that people who live in a different country than their parents get vertigo from just imagining. “Why is my mom calling my family group at 8 a.m.?” Three days later, I was in Buenos Aires, our hometown, sitting by his hospital bed, watching my father sleep.

You could say he got pretty lucky. He couldn’t move or speak when he came into the hospital. By the time I arrived, he could say “hola, si, no” and maybe a name or two. His mobility recovered right away. He did get lucky. I’d feared things would be much, much worse when I heard my mom’s tone of voice on the phone a few days earlier.

A week or so later, the initial panic wore off. My father was going to be OK. He was released from the hospital and sent back home. I stayed with my parents in the tiny little guest room of their apartment. Soon, my father started working with neurologists and speech therapists. The stroke had created a large injury in his brain. And the part where language is stored was severely compromised. He would, they assured us, recover most, if not all, his communication capabilities. But it would take time.

How would we communicate until then?

The first night home, we watched some silly movie on streaming. It was in English and we were worried he wouldn’t understand. But he laughed giddily, became excited with the suspense, and I remembered: That’s right … cinema is one of our love languages.

I wouldn’t blame you for thinking this sounds like an exaggeration. Of course he still has other ways of communicating. He can point to things. He can smile, hug people, take my mom out for an impromptu living room tango. He can still make a killer espresso. And with every new day, there are about a dozen new words that he incorporates into his vocabulary. So his speech is kind of there …

But movies … Movies are something else. At night, when looking up what to watch, the way his eyes lit up when he saw that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was available to stream, I knew he wanted to share it with me. I knew it was special to him.

Of course it’s an overly sentimental simplification to say cinema is a love language between me and my father. But I’m a filmmaker. That’s what I do. It’s how I metabolize things. I take something really difficult for me to understand and I try to boil it down into something that could maybe make sense in the span of a two-hour screen experience.

Many of the wordless encounters that played out during those post-hospital days with my parents felt like movie scenes. Would the movie version of this period be like? Would it be an ensemble piece? A family drama? A deadpan comedy from his POV? Maybe I was escaping the situation by thinking this way, but I couldn’t help myself.

Still. I stand by it. Cinema is one of our love languages. I could name a dozen or so examples from my childhood that come to mind to illustrate the point, but I’ll keep it short and sweet and mention one.

When I turned 18, my father did two things. First, he shared with me a family secret. “Now that you’re old enough, you deserve to know that …” Won’t forget that one anytime soon.

The second thing he did was sit me down and say, “Now that you’re old enough, it’s time for you to experience real cinema.” He proceeded to screen a series of movies for me over the next few months that would change my life.

2001: A Space Odyssey. Apocalypse Now. Brazil. Dr. Strangelove. Network. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Real cinema, indeed.

This wasn’t just casual movie-watching. I know what that feels like in my household. No, this was different. He didn’t say it then, but I started to understand that these weren’t just films he liked. These were the films that made him. They reflected the restless, passionate, rebellious youth that I had only seen glimpses of in old family photos. I had always wondered what he was like when he was around my age, and these films were like a portal into his younger self.

Watching these movies connected us in a way that language never could. I looked over at him once while we watched them in our basement and saw him completely absorbed, his eyes lit up, a flame reignited, a secret passage to his past unlocked. He smiled at me, making me his accomplice in this ritual. It was a moment of love. It was a rite of passage. I understood more about him then than any family secret could ever reveal.

At the time, I didn’t know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was still wondering whether I should study architecture or political science. Film as a career would not become a real pursuit until a few years later. But these shared moments were so memorable that they planted the seeds of the kind of movies I would one day want to make.

A week ago, I sat on the floor of his living room apartment and grabbed the remote. It was my turn to choose what we would watch. I showed him the trailer to my film.

It was his first time seeing any of the images from the movie. And of course, I wasn’t watching the screen. I was watching him. Look, I will happily recognize that my movie is no Network or 2001 or Apocalypse Now. But his eyes still lit up, seeing his son’s imagination come to life on the screen. Perhaps not real cinema, but for the first time, a real movie. He looked at me and smiled. Words didn’t matter anymore. I knew what he felt. I felt it too.

Featured image shows a recent shot of Tomás Gómez Bustillo with his father.