Stories often start small. Someone goes on some quest and reclaims something that was taken from them in the past, be it a lover, a pot of gold, or a spark of joy. When told right, the stories morph into something everybody somehow understands—or at least feels. Without losing their specificity, the stories open up like a window, dressed with the kind of curtains or blinds that are part of your own unscripted imagination, memories, or fantasies.
Many such small stories were presented at BRIFF in the last few days. One of those was a first film by Christian Einshøj, The Mountains (Bjergene, 2023). In an attempt to rekindle family bonds, he showed what must not have been an easy trip down memory lane. Using a whole lot of archival material from his father, he showed how loving children in the nineties turned into apparently distant relatives some thirty years later. It is both a typical oldest-child-symptom and a great catalyst for a film to try and reconnect with your family. His mother sharply says she does not want to talk to her son if she can only talk to him through a camera. It feels insincere. However, one of Christian’s brothers asks him to take out his camera precisely because he wishes to talk and is about to open up about long-past darkness. He grew up being filmed by his father and his older brother, he is used to having a lens as a mediator. He feels safe and heard. Christian too is aware that the camera, instead of creating a distance, had brought him closer to his father. He realizes what Dziga Vertov wrote a hundred years ago:
“I am now free of human immobility. I am in perpetual motion. I approach things, I move away from them. I slip under them, into them.”
Not a human immobility, but perhaps an emotional immobility, begins to dissolve in front of the Einshøj family camera, after lots of talks and work and car rides. Christian’s camera is a shield, a canvas, a motor. And we recognize the wish to trigger a mother, a father, or a lover in an attempt to draw them out of their treacherous silence.
At BRIFF, Les Miennes ((Y)our Mother, 2023) very much fought such treacherous silence, coming from a mother in this case. Samira El Mouzghibati filmed her sisters, her father, but mostly her mother in an attempt to grasp why she fails to understand her daughters’ ways of being. For the daughters, family equals a circle in a triangle in a square. In other words: impossible to define or to reckon with. The women try to go with the flow of family traditions, but when mother says that a woman without a man is like a house without a door, the five sisters collectively raise their eyebrows. They just as much believe that family is a dark path and that rebellion equals freedom. They want to move and they want to live. Preferably without hurting mother, hopefully seen and understood by her. It is a very personal light El Mouzghibati shines on a terrifyingly universal pain. Whereas Einshøj managed somehow to draw his family closer, the young Moroccan-Belgian director will need more time still.
Indispensable time, to open up their stories and allow audiences all over the world to enter with their own backpacks. How so? By sharing not only names and faces, but mountains, too, and trees and music. Tears and laughter. Family footage, which was never romanticized or dramatized. The bigger pictures, the classical stories, repeat themselves in every film. It is through the patchwork of all these variations in movies, poems, and paintings that the stories, the mechanisms, and the big big world, little by little, become easier to understand.
Kathy Vanhout
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2024