“Why Come Back Every Summer”

By Juli Suàrez.

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A story of Pain Transformed into Light
By Imen Mokred*

The short fiction film Why Did You Come Back Every Summer by the Spanish director Juli Suàrez released in 2024, inspired by a real story from Latin America, unfolds the intimate tragedy of a young girl who endured sexual harassment and incest by her uncle, a man protected by his reputation as a respected policeman in their town. The film lasts only nineteen minutes, yet it carries the weight of an entire lifetime of silence, guilt, rage, and awakening.

It opens inside a cozy, humble house whose warmth seems to promise family closeness. But this atmosphere is no more than an illusion. The tension begins to surface as a small picture frame is held up, an old photo filled with souvenirs that suddenly turn heavy, almost suffocating. Here we meet the young woman at the heart of the story: her features glow with rage and rebellion, yet her placement in the frame is often decentered, almost pushed aside. The camera treats her like someone constantly seen from a single angle, a visual metaphor for detachment, between her and her environment, and also within herself. It is as if she has been split into extremes, unable to find balance, drifting from one emotional edge to the other without ever standing on steady ground.

This extremity continues as she tries to confront her family. They are not unaware of what happened, yet they choose silence, comforting themselves with the illusion of peace: That time will erase guilt, wash away society’s shame, soften the fear of challenging authority. Some relatives show empathy but still prefer quietness, urging her to calm down instead of supporting her rage. Others blame her for revealing the crime, accusing her of breaking the sacred illusion of family unity.

It is here, nearly at the center of the film, that the title emerges like an accusation: Why did you come back every summer? A sentence thrown at her as if she were the one who brought disgrace, as if she had shattered a holy temple. The blame falls on her with the same cruelty that shaped the myth of Medusa; who was transformed into a monster and condemned for a crime committed against her. Medusa was forced to carry the face of horror while in truth she had been a victim. This parallel reinforces the film’s portrayal of how society punishes those who expose violence.

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                                    Medusa​

After this confrontation, the film enters its second half, where transformation begins. We see her driving into a dark tunnel, her cries echoing like a ritual decent. This imagery feels like the start of an inward journey, the beginning of inner change. It calls to mind Rumi’s*(1) words: Yesterday I was smart and tried to change the world; now I am wise and am changing myself.

Between memories of her past and scenes of psychological support in the present, she gradually learns that she is not the problem. She is encouraged to build confidence, to face her life independently, to stop seeking recognition from a family or a society that never protected her. In doubled. This doubling suggests she is finally confronting her two extremes, taking charge of both sides to find balance and inner peace.

Toward the end, we see her in her room, illuminated gently as she writes her feelings, both the dark and the bright ones, pouring everything onto paper. Her body remains calm, as if writing offers a quiet release. And here another symbolic layer appears: the book she writes becomes not only her personal refuge but the very creation of the film itself. It feels as though the whole movie is born from Lucia’s own writing, her own voice shaping the narrative as a form of self-creation. Her book becomes the testimony of the inner “Great work” she has accomplished, transforming her suffering into meaning. Though this, the film turns her individual healing into a collective gesture, a way of offering society hope, light, and justice.

This final path resonates with a mystical and spiritual progression: 
First the black phase, the darkness of the tunnel, the descent into the raw material of pain and difficult life-knowledge; then the white phase, the emotional and soul awakening in the mirror room, where the white surroundings reflect clarity, vulnerability, and self-understanding; and finally the red phase, when she appears dressed in red; the color of love, rebellion, and power. This red becomes the image of intellectual and spiritual light, a sign of her fully awakened consciousness. When she stands in the center of the screen, she breaks away from the earlier framing that kept her off to one side. Now she is balanced, grounded, voiced, and calm in her strength.

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In the last scene, she walks with two women of her family toward a direction we still do not know. Their faces show joy, then hesitation. She has seen her uncle, the source of her inner rage and past imbalance. Yet she steps forward. She asks the two women to leave her face him alone. With one steady gaze and a faint confident smile, she dissolves the power her once held. He leaves the frame defeated, not because of confrontation but because she no longer carries fear.

And then comes the final image: Lucia signing her book beside a banner that reveals her name.
Lucia, light. The director chose this name intentionally, and its meaning crowns the entire journey we have witnessed. Her story becomes a path of illumination: passing through darkness, through soul-clarity and into the red of awakened spirit, transforming pain into knowledge, knowledge into courage, and courage into light. It echoes Rumi’s reminder: that when we cannot find light around us, we must look again, because sometimes the light is inside us.

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The colors, the tunnel, the mirror, the centered frame, the red dress, and finally the book, each of these images becomes a step of her transformation and a reflection of society’s own journey toward awakening against oppressive authority. The film’s silence reinforces this: first the silence of fear and forbidden speech, and later a silence that expresses serenity, clarity, and rebirth.

Suàrez’s film is a quiet yet fierce exploration of resilience. Through Lucia’s journey and through the creation of her own book, the film shows how facing pain directly, instead of hiding it, can illuminate both personal and collective paths toward justice, awakening, and the long search for inner peace.

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Imen Mokred

Imen Mokred is a Yemeni-Tunisian visual artist whose work moves fluidly between painting, movement, writing, photography, and symbolic imagery. She describes herself as an “art translator” an artist who receives visions, emotions, and ideas from the world around her and transforms them into visual or performative expressions. Refusing to confine her creativity to a single medium or style, she lets each artwork emerge in the form it naturally chooses, whether through a gesture of dance, a painted figure, a poem, or captured moment. Grounded in an early self-taught practice, she developed a personal language shaped by mythology, psychology, imagination, mysticism, and esoteric thought. Her work blends surrealism, symbolism, and art nouveau influences, weaving intimate inner landscapes into universal reflections. The female body plays a central role in her imagery, sometimes as her own body used as living art, sometimes as figures within her paintings. For her, it is an allegory of humanity, creation, and the soul. Through the feminine form, she seeks to express emotions and questions that belong to all people, beyond gender or identity. She often says that if all her works shared one name, it would be “Soul-Mate”, as space where every soul can recognize itself.

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(1)Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi was a celebrated Persian Muslim poet, Islamic scholar, Hanafi jurist, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic who was born on September 30, 1207, in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan (then part of the Greater Khorasan province of Persia) and died in Konya (then part of the Sultanate of Rum, of the Seljuk Turks) on December 17, 1273. For this reason, the death of this illustrious thinker and Sufi mystic of Islam is commemorated every year in that city of Turkish Anatolia. He is also more popularly known as Rumi, which means "from Roman Anatolia," since Anatolia was called by the Seljuk Turks the "land of Rum (the Romans)," referring to the Eastern Roman Empire, better known as the Byzantine Empire.

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