SYNOPSIS

I’m a Mexican American with Indigenous roots. My family has wrestled with mental illness for generations.

I grew up in a home with my aunts and uncles always around. I didn’t fully understand at the time, but all of them struggled with mental illness, ranging from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. I always knew something was off about my grandfather - he would wander the halls, trapped in his delusions from his past war experiences - but I didn't realize how this shaped my mother and her siblings.

As I grew older, I learned more about my mother’s family history through personal accounts and shared diaries. She and her seven siblings survived a childhood dominated by a brutal, dark cloud brought on by my grandfather’s PTSD and schizophrenia. Their father’s suffering became their suffering, as he enacted violence on them and their mother.

I witnessed the pain they carried; I saw it fester and ultimately overwhelm them. Living with this traumatic history has been a multi-generational struggle and one that has shaped me. It has been a driving force behind the exploration of inherited trauma in my work.

Three Years Gone is an exploration of the psychological contortions children must make to survive in this kind of family environment and how these events shape them as adults. This film is a journey into my past, an exploration of the psychic pain my family has been plagued with, and a look at mental illness in America today.