Lidia Huerta Domingo: Film, Memory, and the Healing Power of Story
AI-generated editorial illustration for YDSP; not a documentary image of Lidia Huerta Domingo or her work.
Lidia Huerta Domingo’s work moves between filmmaking, writing, memory, and the ordinary details through which people understand a life. Her shado contributor biography describes her as a Catalan-Peruvian filmmaker and writer based between London and Madrid, with a background in Film and an MA in Applied Imagination from Central Saint Martins. Her diary-like, essay-driven style explores love, home, and grief while making room for vulnerability and recognition.
This article is a filmmaker profile, not a summary of one publication or a clinical account. Huerta Domingo’s chapter in the volume carries the title “Film As Therapy: The Healing Power of Story.” The chapter is her work; this article considers the wider relationship among her filmmaking, writing, and published creative record.
A filmmaker of intimacy and attention
Huerta Domingo’s stated themes (love, home, and grief) are not presented as abstract subjects detached from daily life. They appear through domestic spaces, family relationships, uncertainty, and the small records people make while living through change.
That attention to ordinary experience also helps explain why her work belongs in a conversation about film as art. Film can be documentary, essay, diary, archive, performance, argument, or some combination of these forms. It can carry a personal voice without becoming a private document alone. It can invite reflection without dictating what the viewer must feel.
Her short film Catchlight received Best Director Super-Short in the London Director Awards' Winter 2022 competition, a credit shared with Maximillian Newcombe. The festival's own record is the source for that award.
AI-generated editorial illustration for YDSP; not a documentary image of Lidia Huerta Domingo or her work.
Writing from inside uncertainty
Huerta Domingo’s essay “Holding on, letting go: Navigating love and grief through life’s uncertainties” was published by shado magazine on 27 September 2024. The essay documents learning, at age 24 and while living in London, that her mother in Spain had Stage 4 cancer. Huerta Domingo returned to Spain, and her account follows the family’s experience over the two years between diagnosis and her mother’s death.
She writes about anticipatory grief, the strain of living with an uncertain future, and the decision to remain attentive to the present. Huerta Domingo cites Katrina Taee's discussion of anticipatory grief. She also describes journaling, photographing, and filming moments from family life. The images and recordings became what she calls a “museum of memories” — an archive connected to both her own remembering and the possibility that future children might know their grandmother through these fragments.
Her language is precise without trying to make grief orderly. “home wasn’t a place; it was her,” she writes, describing the emotional meaning of returning to Spain.
This passage should be read as part of Huerta Domingo’s published personal essay, not extracted as a general theory of bereavement. Readers should read the essay in full at shado magazine to encounter its context, sequence, and complete authorship.
Recording as part of living through loss
Huerta Domingo’s essay offers a grounded way to consider how technology enters experiences of illness, separation, memory, and loss. A phone camera, a journal, and a family archive are not neutral in every situation. They can become part of how a person notices, preserves, revisits, or communicates an experience. They can also bring difficult moments back into view.
The point is not that recording automatically produces comfort or resolution. The point is that technologies of documentation may become woven into the meaning a person later makes from an event. In Huerta Domingo’s account, filming and photography were part of her effort to hold on to particular people and moments. That is her experience, not evidence of a universal method or outcome.
Her essay offers a personal example of writing, photography, and filming becoming part of remembering someone. That creative practice connects with the broader questions raised by this volume, without suggesting that recording itself constitutes therapy.
AI-generated editorial illustration for YDSP; not a documentary image of Lidia Huerta Domingo or her work.
The chapter and the larger volume
Lidia Huerta Domingo, credited in the volume as Lidia Huerta, is the author of chapter 13, “Film As Therapy: The Healing Power of Story,” in Post-Traumatic Growth and Film/Video-Based Therapy: Cultivating Resilience Through Storytelling and Media Psychology, edited by Dr. Joshua L. Cohen and published by Routledge on 21 January 2026. The 176-page volume is identified by ISBN 9781032505879 and carries forewords by Albert “Skip” Rizzo and Lynn Crandall.
The book is the follow-on to Film/Video-Based Therapy and Trauma: Research and Practice, also edited by Dr. Cohen. That earlier volume was first published in 2022, with a 2023 copyright year. Huerta Domingo is a contributor to the newer volume Dr. Cohen edited; that editorial relationship should not be read as an endorsement, sponsorship, or formal affiliation between her and YDSP. Explore the volume's companion page at filmandvideobasedtherapy.com.
Routledge’s published description says the volume examines film and video as tools associated with posttraumatic growth and emotional healing, and considers storytelling across expressive arts therapies with attention to personal narrative and cultural sensitivity. Those are the publisher’s descriptions of the volume.
The distinction matters. Film can be discussed as an artistic form, a medium of documentation, a subject of research, or part of qualified clinical practice. Those are not interchangeable claims. The medium itself is not the therapist. We can make filmmaking more therapeutic without turning filmmaking into therapy.
Why her work matters to filmmakers
Huerta Domingo’s work raises questions that many filmmakers may recognize but not always name:
- What changes when a film begins as an archive rather than a planned production?
- How does a filmmaker decide what belongs to private memory and what belongs to public storytelling?
- When does a personal image remain documentation, and when does editing give it a new cultural or artistic meaning?
- How can a filmmaker represent grief without turning another person’s life into a symbol?
Her work does not answer these questions for every project. It demonstrates why the questions matter. The value is not in treating a personal archive as a formula. It is in noticing how form, ethics, memory, and relationship meet inside creative decisions.
AI-generated editorial illustration for YDSP; not a documentary image of Lidia Huerta Domingo or her work.
A final invitation to look carefully
Lidia Huerta Domingo’s filmmaking and writing show how a creative practice can remain close to uncertainty without reducing uncertainty to a lesson. Her essay draws attention to the details: a home, a family, a body changing, a memory being preserved, and the ethical difficulty of deciding what should be carried forward.
That is one reason film belongs in the conversation about art. It can hold the visible event and the invisible question beside each other. It can preserve a trace without claiming to settle its meaning.
Dr. Cohen's current coaching, consulting, and educational services are nonclinical and do not constitute psychotherapy, psychological treatment, or a substitute for care from a licensed mental-health professional.