The past never really goes away.

Our pasts shape who we are and can often have an impact on our present day. In the case of Alfredo García and Paulina Costa, the pasts that they must confront in Meeting Point are those of their fathers, both of whom were taken prisoner by Pinochet’s forces in the 1970s. Costa’s father Lucho eventually returned, but Garcia’s father Alfredo Sr, who disappeared when García was only 18 days old, never did.

Now, 45 years later, Garcia and Costa take it upon themselves to investigate and deal with what happened back then through the making of a film which will recreate their fathers’ stories using actors. Through the making of this film within a film, we see Garcia and Costa as they try and reconstruct pieces of their shared family history in the hopes of building a bridge between the past and the present.

While the duo are delving into their fathers’ revolutionary past, we see Chile again enveloped in waves of protest against social inequity under the rule of then-president Sebastián Piñera, thus making the connection between past and present even more explicit. As Costa notes at one point, “Eventually everything happens again. This is happening just as we look back, trying to understand the past, and suddenly, this is in your face.”

Meeting Point is a rather effective and affecting documentary, with director Roberto Baeza drawing the audience in as we follow García and Costa on their journey through the past.