Donna Miranda Movies

As a young man, Filipino director John D. Torres survived two back-to-back familial experiences that made life traumatic and depressing. Torres's father, Rodolfo Torres, was at one time an eminently successful and wealthy publisher - one of the most respected in the Philippines. Then the roof fell in: the senior Torres, responsible for an entire "empire" of self-help books, lost all of his business security and virtually all of his money. Matters grew worse for young John and for the family as a whole (if such a prospect were even conceivable) when a dark and ugly skeleton emerged from Rodolfo's closet: a long-hidden history of bigamy for Rodolfo, and the presence of a second family he had sustained for years, prompting John to put a great deal of distance in-between himself and the rest of his family. With the documentary Years When I Was a Child Outside, Torres takes a deeply personal, self-reflexive and intimate journey through the landscape of this trauma - using the film form and an eclectic compilation of personal materials to examine and come to terms with his own complex relationship with his father and the now-fractured family, and valiantly attempting to build order, structure and meaning out of a situation that is hopelessly confusing. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi