Venice Trailer: Autobiography Meets Fiction in New Film

The Venice Film Festival is set to premiere a deeply personal new work that deliberately muddles the line between fact and fabrication. I Plant My Hand in the Garden, a feature that director Mira Valdez has described as a "fictionalized memoir," will debut at the prestigious Italian showcase, and Hollywood Buzz News can exclusively reveal the first trailer.

Valdez, known for her intimate character studies, wrote the screenplay herself, drawing on episodes from her own childhood spent between her mother’s native Chile and her father’s home in rural Oregon. The film follows a woman in her late thirties, played by newcomer Elena Ruiz, who returns to her estranged father’s farm after his sudden death. There, she unearths a series of letters and photographs that force her to reconsider the stories her family told her - and the ones she told herself.

The newly released trailer opens on a close-up of Ruiz’s hands plunging into dark soil, a visual motif that recurs throughout the film. It cuts between sunlit scenes of a ramshackle greenhouse and shadowy, rain-soaked interiors of a cluttered farmhouse. A voiceover, spoken by Ruiz, says, "Every story I know about my father begins with a lie. I’m starting to think mine do too." The footage never fully clarifies which moments are memory and which are invention, a deliberate choice that Valdez says is central to the project.

“This is not a documentary. It’s not a straight autobiography either,” Valdez said in a statement provided to Hollywood Buzz News. “Memory is a creative act. We edit, we exaggerate, we protect ourselves. I wanted to make a film that acknowledges that, and then asks what happens when a person starts to trust the edited version over the original.”

The director has been cagey in interviews about which parts of the story are drawn directly from her life. In a press note accompanying the trailer, she writes that the protagonist’s journey “began as a private excavation” but eventually became “a shared language for anyone who has ever discovered that their parents were strangers.” The project marks a significant departure for Valdez, whose previous film, The Slow Work of Stone, was a fiction piece about a geologist grieving her sister.

The cast is rounded out by veteran character actor James Holloway as the father, whose gruff exterior hides a secret about his own immigrant past. Supporting roles include Aisha Nkem as the protagonist’s sharp-tongued aunt, the only family member who refuses to romanticize the family’s history, and Diego Fuentes as a local archivist who helps Ruiz’s character sift through municipal records. Early buzz out of pre-festival press screenings has pointed to Ruiz’s breakout performance and the film’s unconventional narrative structure, which includes short animated interludes that illustrate the protagonist’s internal fantasies about her parents’ younger selves.

Critics are already debating whether the work should be classified as autofiction, a term increasingly used in literature but rare in cinema. Valdez welcomes the label. “Film is always a lie that tells the truth,” she says in the trailer’s closing seconds, as the camera pulls back to reveal Ruiz standing alone in the center of a cornfield, a notebook in hand. “I’m just being honest about the lying.”

I Plant My Hand in the Garden will hold its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September. The studio behind the project, Northlight Pictures, has not yet announced a wide theatrical release date, though industry sources suggest a limited autumn rollout is likely to follow the festival circuit. The trailer, now available online, offers no specific plot details beyond the setup, leaving audiences to guess at the revelation that prompts the protagonist’s crisis of identity.

For Valdez, the project is also a meditation on place - specifically, what it means for a person to inherit a landscape, not just a family. The garden of the title is both literal and metaphorical. “My father planted everything by hand,” the protagonist says in one trailer scene, her voice thick with loss. “He believed you could grow anything if you refused to leave it alone. I think he was talking about people.”

The Venice premiere is expected to be a major test of whether the film’s hybrid approach resonates with international audiences and awards voters. With its emphasis on memory, migration, and the stories families perform for one another, the project arrives at a moment when the film world is increasingly drawn to personal, boundary-pushing nonfiction. Whether it will be remembered as a breakthrough or a curiosity remains to be seen, but Valdez’s willingness to plant her own hand in the narrative soil has already made it one of the festival’s most anticipated debuts.

Source: Hollywood Reporter