My Family in 17 Takes

With three types of images, mostly family archives in Super 8, and through meticulous work on the sound, enriched by interviews with her numerous siblings, the director takes us to the heart of the drama.

He disappeared. Some voices recount his death. Like sketches of an existence, other voices evoke his life. The interplay of silences and voices outlines what he was. While some express a need for transcendence in the face of loss, through displays of hunting carcasses and agricultural machinery, one also feels insensitivity—brutalizing without awareness. A habit that nature might cruelly turn into custom. Violent, inevitable fate.

Then, on another level, she intervenes. She reveals her intimacy drop by drop, like a riddle. She seems to want to speak of another mystery, with a different nuance of gravity.

Two narratives. Two circles that intersect from time to time, between fusion and distance, on two planes of sorrow.

She now searches for him as much as she once wanted to flee him. Writing on the screen gradually unveils the unresolved, following the unseen, the unwanted, the implied.

Fabrice Montal
Exhausted critic and historian of the impossible

Presented in collaboration with