(ON GOING) Over 5 million Venezuelans have left the country. My parents, my brothers and all of my closest friends are a part of it. I saw my home become empty and my memories become blurry, as if looking at my childhood through a foggy window. Silence slowly took over the rooms that once belonged to my loved ones, and I looked for shelter in natural places where I could reconnect with my country. I traveled to rural areas looking for the Venezuela of those childhood memories and I found it, in the middle of solitude, struggling to survive the general decay. I Can’t Hear the Birds is a documentary project that portrays Venezuela as a mental state. Mixing images of nowadays rusty landscapes of Venezuela, the emptiness of the houses from friends who left and memories from their family albums, it aims to build memory and show migration from the point of view of those who see everything changing from the inside. Either you leave or you stay, but your home is no longer there. This is the story of the Venezuelan middle class, often overlooked to pay attention to more urgent matters in our deeply complex crisis. Seven consecutive years of economic collapse and political crisis left a devastation only comparable to countries that went through an armed conflict: 96% of the Venezuelan population live below the poverty line, according to an investigation made by 3 independent universities, destroying the middle class and increasing the inequality gap. In March 2020, right before the borders closed, I came to Colombia and was locked down here until I became a migrant myself, so new chapters will be done when I go back home in the next few months.