In My Mother's Garden

At first, there was nothing but rhubarb in the filmmaker’s mother’s garden. A raspberry bush was eventually added, which eventually turned out to be a blackberry bush. One surprise among many, within this nature that is always in the process of becoming, this natura naturans that, through the filmmaker’s gaze, becomes a handful of teeming images, framed to make us feel the tactility of the elements and the sovereignty of an incessant overflow, beautifully enhanced by a dense soundscape. From blackberry bushes to cinematic images, an angel passes between the filmmaker’s sensory approach to her mother’s world and the emotional lessons her mother draws from the behaviour of plants. “Plants are the first thing you can’t control,” she tells us. Elsewhere: “You are not so invested emotionally in these plants, otherwise it can destroy you.”

Less a portrait of a mother than a portrait of multifaceted relationships—between daughter and mother, but also between nature and self, and personal situations that intersect and challenge one another—this short film by Rebekka Ribs Beauchamp moves me with the lucid tenderness with which it approaches existence, in all its dimensions of vitality and loss. We encounter the companionship of trees, the aggressiveness of rose bushes, a certain measure of ugliness in the process of birth, ritual gestures, arms entwining. Through the prism of the garden, it is the full power of our relationships with the living world and with the world itself that finds room to flourish, under the auspices of care and acceptance.

Maude Trottier
Editor-in-Chief, Hors champ magazine