For thirty years, Sofía Brockenshire’s father travelled the world as an official of the Canadian Immigration Service, his family always by his side. Diaries and other contemporary documents show the numerous relocations, the destinations in South Korea, India, in South and Central American countries. The result is a detailed mosaic of memories and audiovisual snippets that tries to take not only the civil servant’s perspective, but also that of his wife and children.

When asked where they originally came from, the Brockenshire kids answer cleverly: from the suitcases. Because they travel with them year after year, always prepared to have to leave a place they just moved to. The life of the family is determined by the Canadian authorities, they seem to have practically no say in the matter. Neil Brockenshire’s views on his professional career are ambivalent: full of gratitude and certain to have helped people, but also thoughtful and occasionally resentful. In her film, Sofía Brockenshire re-assembles what was scattered across the globe over the decades: photos, thoughts, desires. “The Dependents” is a personal portrait and something of a reflection about the existence as a professional expat in a world that has no borders for some and nothing but obstacles for others.

A poet’s life ends and a film begins to carry on her legacy, prosaically at first. When Juana Bignozzi dies in 2015, the intellectual property rights to her work pass to the young author Mercedes Halfon – as the aged lady had decreed. But Mercedes also inherits a refrigerator and a lot of junk that must be cleared out of the orphaned apartment in Buenos Aires. Together with young filmmakers, she transforms the duty into a poetically fulfilling project.

The result is not only an unusual but actually a non-portrait of a poet – and perhaps not even a result. Rather, it is a continuously growing equation of superimposed faces, texts and images that refuses to simply work out. They look at each other as if in rear-view mirrors: Juana Bignozzi, who speaks to the young from her writings full of humble reverence, and her young female admirers who, reading, filming and browsing through Bignozzi’s legacy, feel almost embarrassed by these declarations of love. What confidence the deceased had in them! What tremendous expectations she had of those whose mother or grandmother she could have been! Their own poetic achievements seem too half-hearted to Mercedes and Laura to ever live up to such advance praise. But even as they doubt, they are already deep into it.