The Taste of Mango review – powerful memoir of family secrets in Sri Lanka
Film-maker Chloe Abrahams combines documentary and memory in candid conversations with the women in her family
The mango taste is bittersweet in this documentary-memoir of family pain and secrets from film-maker Chloe Abrahams. Using a small digital videocamera and her smartphone, Abrahams records intimate, candid conversations with her mother and grandmother, and the resulting movie is a lucid, emotionally honest account of trauma that lies beneath the smiles of family photos and wedding videos.
Abrahams shows the crisis of loyalty and agony of an abusive marriage, but shows also how the generational trauma can be healed when the generations come together. It’s a quietly powerful film to put, perhaps, alongside Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard or Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias. Abrahams is resident in the UK and her family background is Sri Lankan; her mother was abused by her alcoholic stepfather back in the old country – that is, the man her grandmother married after the death of her first husband. This man almost certainly raped her when she was a young girl (there appears to be some slight doubt about the culprit’s identity due to the crime taking place in darkness, though this doubt may have been fostered by the family members themselves to prevent them confronting the full terrible truth). And there is an impossibly painful moment when the film shows her own wedding video in which this man, her abuser, is shown giving her away with everyone locked in an emotional prison of silence.
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