Hoping to resurrect her late grandmother, Júlia, Catarina Ruivo combines household archives with wealthy visuals in a non-fiction movie which efficiently immortalises a cherished beloved one. Previous pictures of Júlia and her husband are printed out and thoroughly positioned in seashores and forests; their black-and-white figures are reduce out from the previous and pasted into the current.
Rita Durão reads Júlia’s private letters aloud. Whereas we watch Júlia’s family and friends chatting with her, making meals for her, and even dancing together with her, all in her absence — they converse to an empty mattress, and obtain no response — this narration provides Júlia a type of voice by way of which her personal ideas, fears, and needs are powerfully expressed.
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Mozambique kinds the backdrop for a lot of the movie, in lengthy, stunning pictures of lush greenery and the solar glinting on the ocean. My Grandmother Trelotótó is a world of lovely nostalgic imagery, but it surely have to be stated that Ruivo avoids interrogation of her grandmother’s paradisiacal expertise of 1940s/’50s Mozambique as a white settler; the movie subsequently sadly dangers upholding a colonial narrative. These visuals do, nevertheless, make the movie fascinating by way of its lengthy runtime, and performance alongside the narration of Júlia’s letters to make us really feel as if we’re viewing the world by way of her reminiscence of it.
