TFTHE FILMREVIEW · 50K FRESH TAKES
This Is My Face — poster
← ALL FRESH TAKES

SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW

This Is My Face: memory against the official story.

This Is My Face · 2019

A source-led reading of This Is My Face as documentary: memory, concealment, documented consensus, and the counterpoint that shifts the conclusion.

THE FILM EDITORIAL DESKAugust 31, 2026302 WORDS
01

THEMATIC CENTER

memory
02

NARRATIVE PRESSURE

concealment
03

FORM

documentary
04

RECORD ANCHORS

often · process · chile

The record for This Is My Face yields three coordinates specific to its premise—often, process, and chile. That vocabulary places memory at the center and gives concealment its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.

This Is My Face brings memory into contact with concealment through documentary. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A sensitive, fully inhabited film whose direction lets emotion surface with precision.

This Is My Face (2019) arrives with the coordinates of a documentaire film situated in 2010s cinema. The record credits Angélica Cabezas Pino with the direction and places its documented performers in the foreground. With an unusually compact form, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.

Read as documentary, the film carries the pressure of concealment. Memory behaves like an edit: it selects, connects, and sometimes distorts what once appeared settled. The most precise critical test is therefore what the secret allows people to maintain before it is revealed. Character-driven stories are sometimes accused of lacking movement. That misses how the crucial decision can be internal, and how cinema has concrete ways to make the unspoken visible.

The twist is to treat forgetting not as an absence, but as an active force organizing the present. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of memory, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The decisive angle is to read the distance between two bodies as a complete dramatic event.

THE VERDICT, REFRAMED

Our angle: small scale can enlarge exactly what cinema needs to show. Here, memory changes meaning under the pressure of concealment.

THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT

In Chile, people who live with HIV fear stigma and exclusion, and often conceal their condition and remain silent about what they are and have been going through. Esta es mi Cara – This is My Face explores what happens when a group of men living with the virus open up about the chronic disease that changed their life trajectories. The film follows a creative process whereby the protagonists produce photographic portraits that represent their (often painful) memories and feelings, a process that helps them challenge years of silence, shame, and misrepresentations. A lesson in the power of collaborative storytelling.

Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.
Year
2019
Runtime
58 min
Direction
Angélica Cabezas Pino
Performers
—