André Bonzel’s first film as the sole director is a personal memoir in which old home movies make up a fragmentary self-portrait and mosaic of past lives. The collage film consists solely of archival footage that is organised by Bonzel’s first-person voice-over, as well as a beautiful score composed by Benjamin Biolay. As a child, Bonzel got into collecting films from ordinary people. In the home movies of others, he saw pictures of familial happiness that felt foreign to him. Something unattainable still flickers in the moving pictures of a girl spending her summer days on the Riviera. When a distant relative passes away, Bonzel receives a large number of films. These unprecedented images from the director’s family history bring up new perspectives into his past.
The film is personal, but the collage-like organization of the thematic field of memory and the past invites the spectator into the meaning-making process. As a whole, the film embodies the human need to understand the past and see meaning in its pieces. Moreover, the film gives rise to broader thoughts about cinema as something that shapes memory. In the flickering ghosts on the screen, we see past lives and loves gone by. Watching them, we, too, perhaps try to claim our place in future histories whose ghosts we ourselves will become.
Ilpo Hirvonen