How to Repudiate Your Father

A surname is supposed to be a simple inheritance. For the four families in this Ecuadorian documentary short, it is anything but. Director David M.G. Espinosa turns his attention to the custom of passing down the paternal last name and the conflicts it creates when a father's name carries a history someone would rather not carry forward, or when a mother's contribution to the family goes unrecorded in the name a child bears. Through interviews with the families themselves, the film examines what a name preserves, what it erases, and what it means to consciously refuse one. Running twenty-five minutes and told in Spanish, it is a thoughtful, personal look at identity, gender, and lineage, and at the quiet act of deciding for yourself which parts of the past you will answer to.