Between Memory and Uprooting: Identity, Old Age, and Documentary Representation in “Yo no soy de aquí”

Abstract

This essay analyzes “Yo no soy de aquí” (2016), a short documentary film co-directed by Maite Alberdi and Giedrė Žickytė, through the lens of the relationships between memory, identity, migration, language, old age, and uprooting. The film follows Josebe, an 88-year-old Basque woman living in a nursing home in Santiago, Chile, who, despite suffering from Alzheimer’s, retains vivid emotional memories of Rentería, her hometown in Spain. Through an interpretive analysis of the documentary’s narrative and audiovisual structure, this study examines how the film portrays cognitive decline not only as memory loss but also as a rupture between the protagonist’s institutional present and the biographical, linguistic, and emotional territory through which she continues to recognize herself. It is argued that the documentary avoids reducing Josebe to a clinical condition or a figure of passive vulnerability. On the contrary, it presents her as a person who attempts to maintain her sense of belonging through memories, repeated questions, and the occasional use of Basque, a language for which she no longer finds speakers in her surroundings. The nursing home thus appears as an ambivalent space that guarantees material protection but fails to bridge the gap between the place where Josebe physically resides and the cultural world she continues to inhabit in her memory. It is concluded that *Yo no soy de aquí* constructs an ethic of listening that makes the experience of estrangement palpable and argues that dignified care requires