On February 8, 1989, Cecilia was six years old and playing in the back of her parents’ jewelry store when she saw her mother turn pale at the news of a plane crash: her father’s plane had crashed on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. She never saw the coffin, and for years she clung to the hope that he was alive, hidden away in that place with an exotic name she’d only heard mentioned in weather reports: the Azores.
Many years later, when she realized that this loss continued to shape her life, she decided to set out. It was June 4, 2014—another Wednesday.
She traveled to the island alone, made her way through the woods to the crash site, and found the wreckage of the plane, finally coming to terms with her past. What transformed that journey was her encounter with Fernando, the air traffic controller responsible for the accident. He was the one who sought her out, and their meeting—at the Lisbon airport—gave rise to an unexpected friendship, one capable of transforming pain into something human and luminous.
In the years that followed, Cecilia collected and digitized photographs, home videos, and investigative documents, compiling a personal archive that served as the foundation for her film. With it, she comes full circle, transforming memory into a creative act. Her most revolutionary act is realizing, after so long, that she is happy.