AllMovie

Of the many journeys undertaken by global immigrants, perhaps none is more vital or profound than the journey toward a sense of identity, of belonging, and of making contact with one's familial origins. These transmigrations may be literal and geographic - as an individual returns to the actual milieu inhabited by his or her ancestors - or simply a question of attaining greater understanding through a search for one's heritage (witness the popularity of genealogy on the internet) but all are rooted in a need familiar to, and shared by, transplanted individuals around the world. With her documentary The Labyrinth of Memory (AKA Los Laberintos de la Memoria, 2006), director Guita Schyfter crisscrosses two such stories. The first tale belongs to the filmmaker herself; it tells of Schyfter, a half-Lithuanian, half-Ukrainian Jew born in Costa Rica, who as the cameras roll learns of her ancestors' journeys from Central Europe and Central America to the United States. The second concerns Teté, a woman adopted out of Chiapas by an American anthropologist, then subsequently readopted by a Cuban godmother, who as the film progresses hearkens off to Mexico in search of her own ancestry. Throughout the film, Schyfter draws correlations between these highly personal accounts and a ritual undertaken by sea turtles, who similarly make a collective pilgrimage to the beach where they were born, in instinctive need of contact with their origins.