When my grandmother died I wanted to save her, and filming her seemed to me to be the only solution. My starting point was the belief that cinema creates an illusion of reality so strong that, by filming the absence of a body and making visible the space it had occupied, I would be able not only to show the sorrow of that absence, but also to create a physical being, to bring a ghost back to life.
I began by filming her daily routine with those who care for her throughout her life and I rediscovered the ways of the countryside, where people still make bread at home and time has a different duration.
In the attic of her house I found a trunk full of letters from her to her parents when she went to live in Mozambique in 1946/57.
I discovered a new intimacy with my grandmother, I got to know her fears and her desires, I lived in her world.
Through her letters I discovered colonial Mozambique, then a paradise for its white settlers. Yet this paradise was hell or purgatory for others. Since my grandparents were left-wing, I did not find in these letters the brutal racism we know existed of black servants being sent to sepoys to be punished, but an everyday racism ‘served up’ with tea and toast, ‘…among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me’, inscribed in language, habits and social organisation.
I went to Africa. I wanted to see and film the places where my grandparents had lived and been happy. Not out of a hankering for the past but to film the unstoppable life force that is constantly changing, advancing and regenerating itself. I wanted to show how places are both spaces of memory and of transformation.
I made this film to save my grandmother and, in exchange, the film saved me. Working with people who had never been in films before helped me rediscover cinema and brought back, intact, my desire to make films, a desire I thought I had lost.