”Tell me, Mom. What memories do you have of your mother?”
“About grandmothers. I don’t have a grandmother anymore. My mother in voice-over talks about her grandmother.” (Chantal Akerman)
Commissioned by French television as part of a series about grandmothers, Dis-moi follows Chantal Akerman as she speaks with a handful of Jewish women who survived the Shoah, including her own mother, who left Auschwitz an orphan and whose voice we hear from time to time, but never see. The filmmaker is in the frame and conducts the interviews, bearing witness to the stories told by these elderly women.
“Dis-moi is grounded in practices of listening, receptivity and silent accounting, as Akerman’s presence allows each woman to elaborate her lifetime story. They do so gingerly, selectively. The repetitions, ellipses and rhymes between them accumulate across the sequence of visits, becoming formal signs, like much of Akerman’s work – resounding tropes of return, wraithlike in their delicate yet bruising impact.” (Elena Gorfinkel)
“The set-up in which Akerman captures these stories is the exact opposite of that in Jean Eustache’s Numéro zéro (1971), filmed for the same ‘Grand-mères’ series, where Odette Robert, dark glasses and whisky glass in hand, was already very much an Eustache character.” (Stéphane Delorme)
Presented in a version restored by INA.