This post is on behalf of my father, who is trying to get me to pay my bills, and this film will serve as an object lesson. 
"I’m trying to find a film I saw 5-10 years ago, in a theater. It was Italian (or maybe Spanish) with English subtitles. The story was about a father who took his recently married son up to the attic to inform him of the family tradition of the son paying off the cost of his birth and raising before he can have his first baby. As the father is presenting receipts and as the son is adding them on an old mechanical adding machine, the father tells the son the stories his childhood and of their ancestor’s troubles paying their fathers.
I remember also a dream sequence where the son is on a train with his ancestors, who are telling him stories of the difficulties of paying the debt in time."
Does this strike a chord with anyone?
Justin