After receiving a call from her father asking to see her again, a Mexican journalist reconstructs her family’s history, marked by trauma and inherited violence. In the process, she discovers in writing a path toward healing and personal redemption. A deep and moving family drama from the acclaimed author Socorro Venegas.
Andrea, a Mexican journalist, receives an unexpected call from her father Bernardo after ten years of absence. He asks her to travel to Denver to see him, plunging her into memories of a childhood marked by her father’s alcoholism and the accidental death of her younger brother Gabriel. Her mother, cold and distant, gives her clothes to take with her, hinting that her father is close to death.
Before traveling to the United States, Andrea visits her grandmother Paz in San Luis Potosí to better understand her father’s past. Her grandmother reveals how Bernardo was traumatized in childhood by his own father, a violent butcher who forced him to participate in animal slaughter. These experiences would later explain his alcoholism and his inability to build a stable family.
At the same time, Andrea maintains conversations with Eugenio Millá, a writer suffering from cancer, who encourages her to write about her family history as a form of catharsis. Millá, a cynical yet perceptive man, shares his own reflections on love and death while confronting his terminal illness.
Upon arriving in Denver, Andrea finds her father aged and fragile, but sober. During their reunion, they revisit old memories, particularly their shared love of Bruce Lee films, which represent some of the few happy moments of her childhood. Bernardo confesses that he worked as a butcher in the United States, unknowingly repeating his family’s cycle of violence. Andrea gives him a short story she wrote about his life, imagining his traumatic youth. In a moment of connection, he sings her a song from his childhood.
Back in Mexico, Andrea gives her writings to Millá, who receives them as a testament to pain transformed into art. The novel ends with this symbolic gesture, where the written words seem to merge with the writer’s illness, suggesting that both art and life are ways of confronting loss and inherited suffering.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: Socorro Venegas is a Mexican writer of fiction and poetry, winner of the Benemérito de América Poetry and Short Story Prize and the Carlos Fuentes Novel Prize, the latter for The Night Will Be Black and White.
In The Night Will Be Black and White, the author constructs a tightly woven narrative centered on a family shaped by trauma and violence, yet one that, in a particular and subtle way, ultimately conveys love. The characters are complex and multifaceted, never confined to a single profile. It is an intense, moving work with touches of humor.
The novel lends itself to a sensitive and poetic visual approach, in the vein of Aftersun or Roma, exploring trauma, memory, and redemption through art.
POTENCIAL AUDIOVISUAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Film.
IDIOMAS DISPONIBLES: Spanish.
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