Annotations in Borrowed Blood, 2026, Documentary film

Every Sunday, I ask myself the same question: Grandma, shall we go to El Rastro?

At El Rastro, I buy boxes of slides and photographs of families I will never know. Ten euros for hundreds of other people’s memories. Five euros for images of lives that are not mine. And yet, it is among these found archives that I search for my grandmother. Because doing so feels easier than reaching out to her.

The film (Anotaciones en Sangre Ajena) emerges from this contradiction. Through found materials and altered images, I attempt to construct a possible grandmother: to imagine her holidays, her laughter, the smell of her kitchen. To stitch together a memory from fragments of other people’s lives, because there is a gap in my own that I do not know how else to fill.

The film intervenes in these images, allowing the colour red to emerge. A presence that intrudes like a wound or an interference, a way of making visible what is missing and refuses to disappear, even as an attempt is made to reconstruct it.

Can a fiction built from other people’s memories ever feel as real as an inheritance of one’s own?