CASA

Daniela de Felice films her mother preparing to move from the family house, in which the father, who died in 1997, is cruelly absent. The final inventorying is complicated by hazy memories of the father’s death and begins to resemble a ritual farewell. Despite the seemingly banal goings-on (tidying, boxing up belongings before the move), the intimacy of the simply filmed conversations gives rise to emotions that seem to have long been unexpressed. It seems that these belated exchanges are the only way of completing a mourning process begun fifteen years ago. Instead of the expected stories triggered off by the objects being packed away, the film echoes a common point between mother and daughter: the passion for collecting. Behind the teaching vocation of the mother (intent on educating her grandchildren with boxes of beetles and shells) and behind the shots collected by the filmmaker before she leaves, we sense the same certainty that gathering is a staunch safeguard against the evaporation of memory. Everywhere, on boxes and walls, only the dust bears witness to time gone by. (Charlotte Garson)