04/07/2023 - Émilie Brisavoine goes back in time to untangle her family’s painful fate in a captivating documentary directed with commendable passion and inventiveness

"Why did we have to go through all that? What have I ever done to you, other than be your child?" After Oh La La Pauline! [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]  (discovered in Cannes’ 2015 ACID selection), French filmmaker Émilie Brisavoine is once again immersing herself in the family crucible with her second feature-length documentary, the captivating and poignant Keeping Mum [+see also:
trailer
interview: Emilie Brisavoine
film profile], which was unveiled in the Proxima Competition of the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

"She’s always talking about ghosts and dead people communicating with her". The mother of Émilie and her younger brother Florian (both now adults and parents themselves) is a singular character, a lover of all things medium-related and spectacularly prone to verbally aggressive, no-filter outbursts, which could almost be funny if they didn’t mask the severe fractures which tore their way through the younger days of her two children, who still carry the resulting psychological scars with them today. In order to heal, and to free herself from the weight of the past, from the internalised fear and anger which are eating away at her, and from the memories which she can neither distance herself from nor openly confront, Émilie decides to try to make sense of the haze of her childhood "so as to reach a place where time, space and matter are compressed and compacted into an infinitely tiny point." She does this by turning to the diaries she kept at the time, photos, a few family videos from the early ‘90s, Skype conversations with her brother (who suffers with serious anxiety) and meetings with her mum who has suddenly turned into a "kindly" grandmother, poles apart from the deranged, violent and highly troubling, divorced woman she used to be and whom Émilie and Florian only saw during the holidays.

Obviously, the director embarks upon this ferocious, therapeutic investigation into the nightmare of her childhood by laying bare her own feelings: her agonising emotional oscillation between fear, anxiety, a desire to understand, repressed hate, and forgiveness which is so hard to give. But she does so with remarkable creativity and narrative restraint, well supported by Karen Benainous’ excellent editing. Interspersed with pedagogical astrophysics sequences (about the collision of galaxies, black holes, etc.) which resonate wonderfully with the electromagnetic vortex of this family’s history, the story successfully walks the tightrope between (dark) humour and drama, probing and excavating memories of a devastated childhood whilst leading an adult life. It’s an incredibly personal investigation which gradually reveals all the traumas suffered by the filmmaker and her brother during childhood, but also those suffered by their mother - a highly sensitive woman totally shattered by the brutality of day-to-day life - in her earlier days. As she unravels the string of toxic relations passed down from one generation to another, Émilie Brisavoine not only proves the purifying power of art-therapy, she also delivers an original, fascinating, moving, and superbly high-quality documentary.

Keeping Mum is produced by bathysphere and sold worldwide by Best Friend Forever.

(Translated from French)