The Weight of Memory in a Changing Mexico

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MOVIE REVIEW
The Shipwrecked (De schipbreukelingen)
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Genre: Documentary, Drama
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 55m
Director(s): Diego Gutiérrez
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 IDFA

RAVING REVIEW: THE SHIPWRECKED unfolds like a long, unbroken breath—one held for thirty years and released in a film that carries the weight of distance, homesickness, and the ache of leaving a country that shapes you even after you’ve built a life somewhere else. Diego Gutiérrez returns to Mexico not with the intention of reclaiming the life he once had, but with the quiet, painful awareness that returning does not heal everything. Instead, he observes. He listens. He records people whose stories reflect the fractures, hopes, and contradictions of a place both familiar and forever altered. The result is a documentary that operates on a deeply human level, anchored in contemplation rather than urgency.

The film begins with the admission that thirty years abroad changes how you see home. Gutiérrez’s life in the Netherlands has offered safety, stability, and a quieter existence. Still, it has also created a distance—one he seeks to measure by immersing himself in others' views. His approach isn’t confrontational or interrogative. Instead, he captures people who, in one way or another, are navigating loss, danger, or disconnection within Mexico’s unpredictable landscape. These lives become emotional anchors, each one reflecting a question that Gutiérrez himself carries but cannot articulate outright.

One of the film’s most striking decisions is its use of widescreen framing. In the press materials, the production highlights the intentional use of a widescreen format to present Mexico’s natural beauty at its most sweeping and overwhelming. These images aren’t postcard-perfect. They’re deliberate compositions meant to contrast human fragility with the immensity of the land. On screen, mountains and open fields feel like witnesses to the characters’ struggles rather than passive backdrops. We see a farmer returning to his father’s land after years of absence. Young conservationists are repairing what has been damaged while understanding they cannot protect everything. An art restorer meticulously returning a statue of Jesus to its original form, a metaphor the film uses with subtlety rather than force.

These portraits are shaped by pain—some personal, some tied to the violence embedded in daily life. People speak about loss in quiet tones. They talk about danger as if it were weather. They speak about hope with a kind of caution that feels earned. Gutiérrez is not looking for grand solutions or declarations. He is looking for something that can dull the ache, even if only temporarily. What he finds is not resolution but companionship in struggle.

Albert Markus's editing is crucial to the film’s tone. Rather than driving momentum, it allows scenes to breathe. It holds moments longer than expected, giving viewers time to absorb the emotional undercurrents in silence, a technique that reinforces the documentary’s contemplative nature. Silence is not empty here—it is where the film’s deepest emotions unfurl.

Where the film truly excels is its balance of the personal and the universal. While Gutiérrez’s own history is the catalyst for the project, he rarely foregrounds himself. Instead, he uses the people he meets as fragments of a larger meditation. Their stories are specific, but the questions they raise—about danger, purpose, belonging, grief—resonate beyond geography. The documentary does not claim that life in a safer country is inherently better; nor does it romanticize the difficulties faced by those who remain in Mexico. It presents a prismatic understanding of what it means to endure.

The pace is deliberately slow, which may divide viewers. But slowing down is part of the experience. The film wants you to sit in the ambiguity that the characters live with daily. It invites contemplation rather than resolution, mirroring the emotional journey of someone who left a country out of necessity and now returns not quite as an insider or outsider. The ambiguity becomes the point. The film suggests that sometimes the best we can do is move forward, even without answers.

THE SHIPWRECKED earns its heart through that emotional honesty. It is not a documentary built on dramatic twists or investigative revelations. It is a human portrait, one that trusts its audience to engage with silence and the emotional residue of exile. It respects the people it portrays enough to center their stories without imposing a thesis. It respects the complexity of returning home after decades away. And it respects the viewer’s ability to sit inside unresolved questions.

This is a film for those who appreciate documentary work that doesn’t hold their hand but invites them to feel. It lingers. It meditates. It breathes. And long after the credits end, it continues to echo—quiet, searching, and deeply human. Something is undeniably intriguing about a film that leaves you thinking, as this one does.

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[photo courtesy of COBOS FILMS]

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