Synopsis
Echoing her own mother’s voice recounting her relationships with her mother and grandmother, filmmaker Chantal Akerman visits three elderly Jewish women and asks them to speak about their ancestors. Seated in their living rooms and filmed in static shots, these grandmothers share their memories, the life of Jewish communities before the war, the Holocaust, and the efforts to survive the horror. A whole world lost in the concentration camps is brought back to life through their words.
A word from Tënk
On Grandmothers. I no longer have a grandmother. My mother, in voice-over, speaks about her grandmother.¹
It is with Dis-moi that the now legendary Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman responded to a commission from French television for a series on grandmothers. With a stripped-down, almost invisible mise-en-scène and a highly discreet representation of self, the director weaves her film around the figure of the maternal grandmother, a figure incessantly recalled and painfully absent. In voice-over, Akerman’s mother remembers her own mother, who disappeared in Auschwitz, and her grandmother, who took her in after the devastation of deportation. In real-time, Akerman meets three elderly women, all of Jewish origin, all survivors of the desolation of World War II, and asks them to speak about their grandmothers. Several generations of women erased by the camps are brought back to life through words, take shape through images. While the chasm of suffering is very real and the distance of horror can never be fully bridged, it ceases, for a moment, to be elusive and becomes magnificently tangible, for the duration of a film.
1. Akerman on her film Dis-moi, remarks collected by Nicole Brenez and reviewed by Chantal Akerman, Paris, July 15 – August 6, 2011.
Charlotte Lehoux
Programmer
