Mariquina

The film takes place during two periods in Imelda's life, when she was a young girl and when she's grown up. Imelda's father is a shoemaker, and the imagery of the film keeps landing on shoes as symbols of her father's particular brand of love.

And then there's the cute name connection with Imelda Marcos, the shoe-crazy wife of the dictator, who is shown on TV just after he has been overthrown, when our Imelda is a little girl.

Imelda's childhood becomes difficult when her mother abandons her and her father, and her father takes up with another woman. As the years pass, her relationship with her father grows more distant. At the time we are introduced to the grown-up Imelda, her father has just committed suicide. How Imelda deals with this is the main business of this film.

Thanks to fine directing and acting, we experience the characters' feelings largely through subtle facial expressions and body language. The film is done so sensitively that it just might might inspire you to think back to some major sadness may have changed the course of your life and to revisit the ways that you coped, then and now.