Tango Retirada is a poetic documentary that explores the plasticity of memory through Isabel’s childhood recollections of war, exile, and displacement. Following the years between the bombings of Bilbao and her eventual arrival in Mexico, the film traces how memory transforms experience across time.

Moving between the Basque Country, France, and Mexico, her journey unfolds through a shifting visual language that blends clear-cut imagery with unique iridescent distortions. Childhood recollections, archival fragments, radio broadcasts, and tango melodies surface and dissolve as past and present coexist within the same unstable image. Rather than reconstructing history as fixed truth, the film approaches memory as fluid, fragmented, and continually reshaped through perception and time. 

Based on a true story and developed in collaboration with a legal researcher at the University of Nottingham (UK), the film combines personal memory with legal and historical research.