4 stars (out of 5)
Margot Nash worked as writer, director, producer, narrator, ‘still photo wrangler’ and more upon this ‘personal essay documentary’, a memoir perhaps similar to Sophia Turkiewicz’s Once My Mother yet different from that film as it resonates with unresolved anger and pain beneath the love and tenderness.
Using family photos (some torn), recordings of her now-late mother Ethel (or ‘Ettie’) talking, clips from her previous shorts and features, music by Elizabeth Blake and a little handheld camera towards the end, Nash attempts to make sense of her family, as her past always comes back to her in “the silences”. And it’s not an easy task, as so much of the truth of what went on in her parents’ marriage and when she was a child was secret and unacknowledged (and yes, more and more silences).
We hear of Margot’s Mum’s failed first marriage and her resultant depression, fantasy life and ability to wound with words, and of her father’s service in the war, and how he was depressed beforehand but how post-traumatic stress later drove him to mania, paranoia and dangerous behaviour. And this filmmaker remembers finding, as a child, the possible key to much of the hurt and anguish by chance, as she poked around in cupboards looking for secrets to explain her fractured family and came upon a photo of a girl who was obviously her sister. A mystery girl called Felicity who was older than Margot and her big sister Diana, who at one time lived back in New Zealand, and who was never ‘right’ (the other R Word is used) and therefore never properly spoken of.
A study of mental illness and how it pretty much destroyed a family and made Margot’s childhood bewildering and even terrifying, this seriously brave and sometimes awfully moving film is about how hard it can be to forgive, the freedom that might come when (and if) you finally can, and the need to speak up and break the silence(s).
I Wake Up Screening 