General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Nos Vemos, Papá

Nos Vemos, Papá (Spanish for "See You, Dad") is a 2011 Mexican psychological drama feature film written and directed by Lucía Carreras in her feature directorial debut. It stars Cecilia Suárez as Pilar, a woman who, after finding her father dead when she returns from work, refuses to accept his death and withdraws into a fantasy world in which she continues to live with him, rejecting her family's attempts to bring her back to normal life¹. The film premiered in competition at the ninth Morelia International Film Festival in October 2011, had its international premiere at the 47th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July 2012, and opened commercially in Mexico on January 18, 2013²^•³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Production	Mexican feature film, 2011; 89 min per the national film registry, 88 min per Karlovy Vary and Morelia listings¹^•⁵^•⁶
Director and writer	Lucía Carreras, who also wrote the screenplay; her feature directorial debut¹
Lead cast	Cecilia Suárez (Pilar), with Arturo Barba, Gabriela de la Garza, Moisés Arizmendi, Verónica Langer, and Marcelo D'Andrea¹
Premieres	Morelia IFF competition, October 2011; international premiere in official competition at the 47th Karlovy Vary IFF, July 2012²^•³
Mexican release	January 18, 2013, opening with 35 copies nationwide⁴^•³
Funding	EFICINE Production, the fiscal incentive of Article 226 of Mexico's Federal Income Tax Law¹
Award	Special jury prize for performance at the Cine las Américas International Film Festival, USA, 2013¹

Spoilers

Plot and themes

Pilar lives alone with her father and leaves his breakfast ready every morning before going to work. One afternoon she returns to find the table untouched, and in his bedroom she discovers that he has died⁷. From that moment her reality and her memories begin to mix: daily life continues, but she lives with her father's ghost, refusing to say goodbye and rejecting her family's desperate efforts to return her to normalcy¹.

Her brother José tries to persuade her to sell the house so she can move on, but Pilar will not yield, and her delusion grows more passionate and takes on more force⁷. The Karlovy Vary festival synopsis describes the story as an intimate drama about the extreme emotions connected to the loss of someone on whom our lives depend, built as a tightening noose in which each event exacerbates the one that follows⁵.

The Electra complex. Carreras framed the film as, at bottom, a love story that outlasts death, and she acknowledged that it addresses the Electra complex, the psychoanalytic term for a daughter's attachment to her father, from a contemporary and female perspective²^•⁸. She said the theme had been little treated in Mexican and Latin American cinema, and that she wanted to explore irrationality, or what some would call madness, as an alternative way of living with the pain of death⁸. She also directed her actors toward restrained performances, without tears, shouting, or exaggeration, so the subject would be handled with balance². The film additionally explores solitude and the woman who has dedicated her life to caring for another person⁸.

Production

Carreras, a Mexican screenwriter and filmmaker, worked on the project for about six years before it reached the screen⁹. Before directing it she was already known as co-writer of Año bisiesto (Leap Year, Michael Rowe, 2010), which won the Camera d'Or for best first feature at Cannes, the first Mexican film to win that prize⁵. The screenplay received support from the Mexican Institute of Cinematography (IMCINE) in the categories of stimulus to creation and project development³.

The film was produced by Machete Producciones with Balero Films, Detalle Films, and Novilunio Producciones, and financed through the EFICINE Production fiscal incentive¹. It was the second Machete production after Año bisiesto¹⁰. Production involved two months of preproduction, five weeks of shooting, and eleven months of postproduction¹¹. It was shot in Mexico City on a Sony F35 camera in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio and delivered on 35 mm¹^•¹².

The crew included cinematographer Germán Lammers, editor Óscar Figueroa Jara, sound designer Rodrigo Flores Esquinca, art director Lucía Barba, and composer Christian Basso¹. The music is built around a tango composed for the film; Carreras had imagined the story with the music of Astor Piazzolla but turned to Basso, writing the lyrics with the Córdoba tango composer Humberto Pastor Brondo¹³. A detail noted by one critic is that the dead father is Argentine, a leftover from an originally planned Argentine-Mexican co-production that fell through, leaving the character's nationality unchanged¹⁴.

Release and reception

After its Morelia premiere in competition in 2011, where it was nominated for best Mexican feature¹⁵, the film toured festivals including Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, Huelva in Spain, Kerala in India, Haifa in Israel, Ourense, Films by the Sea in the Netherlands, and Puebla¹²^•¹¹. It opened commercially in Mexico on January 18, 2013 with 35 copies and, according to Carreras, remained in theaters across practically the whole country, which she described as unusual for independent Mexican films³. Its audience was estimated at more than 200,000 spectators by the time of the DVD release³.

Home video and television. In October 2013 Machete Producciones released the film on DVD, distributing 2,000 copies in department stores and bookshops at a price of 100 to 130 pesos, and negotiated television distribution in the United States and several Latin American countries; the film already had television contracts across Latin America³^•¹³.

Critical response was divided. At Morelia 2011 the film won nothing in competition, and at least two respected critics disliked it intensely, while the critic Ernesto Diezmartínez Guzmán ranked it among the best Mexican films he saw that year and praised Suárez's performance as one whose madness can be unsettling, pitiable, amusing, and finally joyful¹⁴. Screen's Mark Adams, reviewing the Karlovy Vary screening, called it a gentle, delicately thoughtful study of a young woman's state of mind, driven by a moving lead performance from Suárez, while judging it possibly too low-key to break out to international audiences¹⁶. The Karlovy Vary program called it a powerful debut from a director who took inspiration from innovative trends in Mexican cinema but found her own style⁵. The film received a special jury prize for performance at the Cine las Américas International Film Festival in the United States in 2013¹.

Place in Carreras's career

Nos vemos, papá established Carreras as a director after her success as a screenwriter. She went on to co-write La jaula de oro (Diego Quemada-Díez, 2013), which won the Ariel Award for Best Original Screenplay, and to direct La casa más grande del mundo (2015, with Ana V. Bojórquez) and Tamara y la Catarina (2016)¹⁷. Reviewers have noted that her debut stands apart from much recent Mexican film in focusing on ideas and imagination rather than physicality, an intimacy that carries the roots of magical realism even though the director herself rejects that label for the film⁵^•¹³.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2010 to 2014 › Psychological and social drama films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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