Synopsis
“My grandmother is a mystery.” Since the filmmaker’s grandmother lost her memory, the mere mention of it is enough to stiffen her up. What are you hiding from us, Marie-Lourdes, in your thick silence? All of a sudden, tongues are set loose. By telling her story, her relatives conjure up the past, exorcise suffering through laughter, vital laughter. In a process close to engraving, this film borrows from archaeology what digging entails, that is, revealing.
A word from Tënk
How can you create an identity from the void left by a history of violence and trauma? In this stunning short about uprooting and loss, June Balthazar takes on the task of reinventing Creolism by delicately dipping into the darkness of lost memories. Her animation technique, which involves carefully scratching away the dark paint covering a sheet of paper to clearly trace the shape of a story, updates her grandmother’s buried memories. Preserving the memory of this Mauritian message-bearer, this wordsmith now consigned to silence, Balthazar directs a polyphonic narration. Memory becomes a collective effort, reconstructed from conversations with those who knew Marie Lourdes and who help retell her story. According just as much importance to facts as to imagination, dreams and beliefs, Balthazar traces a fundamentally incomplete and contradictory portrait of her mysterious grandmother—an identity in perpetual movement—with great tenderness.
Charlotte Selb
Programmer and critic
