Growth always implies some form of violence. For life in a village on the left bank of the River Nervión in the eighties and nineties, where it's all about heroin, unemployment, and where every week the streets whistle with the sounds of rubber bullets and teargas and the walls are covered in execution orders, violence is not just a personal problem. Absence is Better portrays a broken family, fractured by the violence that surrounds it. Amaia, the youngest of four, tells of the brutality surrounding her through the gaze of a little girl, a teenager and an adult. We share her fears, her confusion, her growing rage at a father who injures and a mother who conceals. And through all her escapes and returns, she discovers nobody can escape their childhood roots. Accepting them is the only way to survive.