In the 1980s, Héctor Jr, a.k.a Quiquin (Juan Pablo Urrego), a college student in Italy, travels back to his hometown in Medellin, Colombia, to attend a ceremony honoring his father, Héctor Sr. (Javier Cámara), a university professor who's about to retire. He recalls his childhood memories with his father, mother and four sisters during the 70's when he (now played by Nicolás Reyes Cano) was 12-year-old.

      Based on the autobiographical novel by Héctor Abad Faciolince, the screenplay by David Trueba tells its story with a non-linear structure that's easy-to-follow because it doesn't jump around between the two time periods in Héctor Jr.'s life. It begins with his college days in the 1980's before flashing back to the 1970's. Memories of My Father is fundamentally a film about a young man coming trying to make sense of the relationship between him and his father. David Trueba shows what their relationship was like back then and how it evolved. Héctor Sr. is husband, a parent and someone who cares deeply about his country's healthcare, i.e. his push to vaccinate everyone against polio with a vaccine that he created and tested on his son. He becomes involved in politics in the 1980's while violence erupts in Medellin concurrently. This film serves as a coming-of-age movie while and a portrait of a family as well as Colombia's dark history. It suffers from the same problem as The Fabelmans's: it covers a lot of ground while biting off more than it could chew with not enough focus. Also, like the most compelling character in The Fabelmans isn't the protagonist who's coming-of-age, the most intriguing and complex character isn't the protagonist either; it's Héctor Sr. The scenes with him teaching Héctor Jr. his values are sweet and tender, but the film doesn't really become truly engaging until Héctor Sr. gets involved in politics later on while putting his life at risk. Some scenes are a bit maudlin, to be fair, and the first act and second act take a while to get going until the darker third act. Until then, the film meanders for the most part while feeling a little repetitive. At least David Trueba doesn't resort to voice-over narration to allow the audience to get inside Héctor Jr.'s head.

      Cinematography-wise, Memories of My Father is very well-shot with great attention to period detail. The flashback scenes of Héctor Jr.'s childhood are in color while the young adult scenes are in black-and-white which breaks convention because usually black-and-white scenes symbolise the past. In this case, they symbolise the darker, more somber elements of the film. Unfortunately, the third act could've used tighter editing because it hits the audience over the head with scene after scene of reactions to a tragic event. Less is more, so screenwriter David Trueba and director Fernando Trueba, his father, don't trust the audience's emotions enough while trusting their patience too much. Those scenes drag and nearly derail the film completely. Fortunately, the performances are heartfelt and compensate for the mediocre screenplay. At a lengthy running time of 2 hours and 16 minutes, Memories of My Father is mildly engaging, sappy, overstuffed and undercooked, but elevated by moving performances, especially by the charismatic Javier Cámara.