Uxbal lives in a shabby apartment in Barcelona with his two young children, Ana and Mateo. He is separated from their mother Marambra, a woman suffering from alcoholism and bipolar disorder. Having grown up an orphan, Uxbal has no family other than his brother Tito, who works in the construction business. Uxbal earns a living by procuring work for illegal immigrants and managing a group of Chinese women producing forged designer goods along with the African street vendors who are selling them. He is able to talk to the dead and is sometimes paid to pass on messages from the recently deceased at wakes and funerals. When he is diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer leaving him with only a few months to live, his world progressively falls apart.
Uxbal initially begins chemotherapy, but he later ends the treatment at the advice of his friend and traditional healer Bea. She also gives him two black stones which she asks him to give his children before he dies. The group of Africans are brutally arrested by the police despite Uxbal's regular bribes because of their involvement with drugs. When his friend Ekweme faces deportation to Senegal, Uxbal offers Ekweme's wife Ige and their baby son a room in his apartment. Meanwhile, an attempt at reconciliation with Marambra fails when Uxbal realizes she cannot be trusted to raise his children. Tito brokers a deal to put the Chinese to work at a construction site. However, almost all of them die while asleep in the basement of their sweatshop due to malfunctioning gas heaters installed by Uxbal. An attempt by a human trafficker to dump the bodies into the sea fails when they are washed up on the shore shortly after.
As Uxbal's health continues to deteriorate, he is plagued with guilt that he is responsible for the death of the immigrants. As his death draws nearer, he realizes that there will be nobody to take care of Ana and Mateo once he is gone. He entrusts the remainder of his savings to Ige, asking her to stay with the children after his death. She accepts his request but later decides to use the money to pay for her return to Africa. She changes her mind at the last minute, however, and returns to the apartment. Knowing that Ige will take care of his children, Uxbal lies down next to Ana and dies after having passed on to her a diamond ring which his father had once given to his mother. He is then reunited in a snowy winter landscape with his father, who had died before Uxbal's birth shortly after having fled Spain for Mexico during the Franco regime.
Where did Uxbal's father flee to?
Mexico