The Books of Good Memory

The Books of Good Memory is the very definition of a passion project. I conceived it during my first semester of film school, with the intention of eventually making it as my thesis film. At the time, my interest was almost entirely removed from conventional narrative. Like my earliest short films, I was not looking to tell a story as much as convey a feeling—something closer to poetry than to a short story.

The film takes its title and much of its spirit from Invisible’s “Los Libros de la Buena Memoria,” written by Luis Alberto Spinetta. What interested me was not so much translating the song’s lyrics into a narrative, but translating its texture into film: its dragging rhythm, its dreamlike atmosphere, and its strange sense of longing.

By my final year of film school, I had abandoned the project as my thesis. Yet the idea of making something guided almost entirely by texture remained attractive, and after graduation I began the long process of trying to bring it back to life.

However, after nearly six months of searching for the right lead actor, the project became more deeply rooted in me. Almost like a prophecy, my own life began mirroring what I had written years before. Scenes that had originally been conceived as pure fiction gradually became more anecdotal. Feelings I had written about from a distance suddenly became familiar. There seemed to be no better time to finally begin shooting.

The film was shot intermittently between the summer of 2025 and the first half of 2026. During that time, the story changed, the cast and crew changed, and my own relationship to the project changed. Ironically, this became appropriate for a film about someone incapable of moving on.

Perhaps that is what The Books of Good Memory ultimately became for me: a film about being unable to let go, made from a project I myself was unable to let go of.