Vivere

In the Tramazzo valley, in Emilia-Romagna, Paola returns to her childhood village to visit her mother, Ede. The kindliness that exudes from her conversation with the filmmaker during their car journey seems contagious. It burgeons even more when we meet the invariably joyful “Mamona”, as she tends her garden or reminisces on her youthful years with her friend next door. For eight years, Judith Abitbol films the visits of Paola, who – as she is often abroad – notices the changes in the local landscape. Be it the cep mushroom-picking or the packing away of blankets before summer’s arrival, the film captures the joie de vivre that pervades these reunions, the hummed songs, the dancing in the middle of the street. When Ede’s first symptoms of Alzheimer’s appear, this long-running film project integrates them seamlessly, with the same caring concern as her entourage. The words of one song come back to Ede: “I was a peasant girl…” As she loses her memory, she seems to invent another one for herself, and the film discreetly restores what is still possible and surprising in this impaired existence. The vibrant intensity of the daughter-mother ties reaches its epitome in the sequence where Paola holds a skein of wool that Ede is winding into a ball – which also happens to be the movement of a film reel… (Charlotte Garson)