At 25, Mabel Valdiviezo packed up her life and left her family and country behind. Feeling misunderstood by her working-class family and amid the violent political repression in Perú, she fled to the U.S. in 1993. Sixteen years later, she returned to Lima — this time with a video camera — in an attempt to reconnect with her estranged family.
“You left so young, and we didn’t know anything about you,” Valdiviezo’s mother, Bila, says in the documentary Prodigal Daughter, which will kick off San Francisco’s Latino Film Festival on October 11. “Could you have died? I didn’t know anything.” Combining difficult family conversations with mixed media art, Valdiviezo’s autobiographical film shows a daughter’s reckoning with a home she rejected, because she felt like it rejected her first.
“I was trying to study to be a filmmaker, to make art,” Valdiviezo told El Tecolote. In Peru, she was part of the burgeoning punk “subte” scene, but her identity sometimes got in the way of her aspirations. “There were always tremendous obstacles, not just because I am a woman, but also because of my social class.”
Becoming an artist in San Francisco came with its own challenges. Valdiviezo became one of the country’s 3.5 million undocumented immigrants after overstaying her tourist visa. Without the ability to pursue mainstream work, she found herself working as a stripper in the city to make ends meet, while also struggling with addiction to drugs and alcohol. “I had a lot of ideas about being in control, but in reality, I wasn’t,” she said. “You’re not in control, the exploitation system is.”
Her complicated past, both in Perú and San Francisco, made it all the more difficult to finally decide to reach out to her family after more than a decade of silence and soul-searching. She reunited with them after receiving her green card in 2009. “Estrangement is complex,” Valdiviezo said. “What struck me the most [when reuniting] was feeling like they had felt my absence with pain, with shame.”
Making Prodigal Daughter, Valdiviezo said, was “an odyssey.” The process spanned 15 years, during which she documented multiple journeys to Lima, filming conversations with her family. She recorded from 2009 to 2016, layering in mixed media art to reflect the emotional and artistic journey she was on — all on a shoestring budget supported by a city grant.
One of the film’s central storylines is Valdiviezo’s strained relationship with her mother, Bila, and the healing process that unfolded between them. Bila’s feelings of judgment and hurt over her daughter leaving and living an undocumented life in San Francisco are captured powerfully on camera. Yet, through this exploration of trauma, their bond grows stronger.
This year, Prodigal Daughter premiered at the Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival. Some of Valdiviezo’s family members traveled to L.A. for the screening, making the event particularly special for her. Among them was her mother, whose art is also featured in the film. “Ultimately, my mom really understands where I am in my journey,” Valdiviezo said. “And it’s interesting because we have very different ways of seeing life.”
Though Prodigal Daughter is deeply personal, Valdiviezo said its broader themes of immigration, gender, mental illness, and family have resonated with many Latinx families who have attended her various festival screenings. “There were a few people under 30 that came to me and talked to me about how the film was impactful for their own experiences in their relationship with their parents,” she said. “People my age also came and said: ‘It helps me to understand and have a relationship with my teenage child.’”
For Valdiviezo, her film also creates space for more nuanced discussions around the undocumented immigrant experience and its impact on mental health.
“There’s been a narrative out there that I think is dissipating, but it was about: let’s just tell the stories of the good immigrants, the deserving immigrants, and if we tell these stories, then we’re going to be in a better position for mainstream Americans to understand us because we’re like them,” Valdiviezo said. “But we’re humans, we’re all very complicated, and so for me, it’s neither a good immigrant or a bad immigrant. It’s in between. It’s a complex narrative.”
Prodigal Daughter will screen at the SF Latino Film Festival on October 11 at 6:30 p.m. at the Roxie Theatre, with a second screening on Nov. 2 at 2:00 p.m. at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. For tickets and more information about these and other festival screenings, visit cinemassf.org.