A young French film-maker of African heritage tries to make sense of his tangled, troubled family history in One Mother. Mickaël Bandela’s autobiographical bio-documentary is assembled in an overloaded, densely layered, non-linear collage style that works against narrative clarity at times, yet still manages to deliver visual beauty and emotional bite. Screening at Dok Leipzig this week, this unorthodox public exercise in cathartic family therapy should gain more festival traction with its oblique, highly personal angles on immigration and foster care issues. The lightly experimental style will mean limited theatrical prospects, but could have art-world crossover appeal.
Bandela’s birth mother Gisèle, a Congolese immigrant to France who features heavily in the documentary, handed him over to a foster family at the age of six months. This is not quite the primal emotional wound it might have been in a more conventional story than this, since the two have always stayed in touch and evidently still share a complex, spiky but mostly loving bond. Another central presence here is the director’s foster mother Marie-Thérèse, a warm and wryly humorous matriarch who welcomed him into a large French-African family in Normandy. Here he seems to have outwardly thrived while concealing darker feelings of abandonment, displacement and alienation.
In his twenties, Bandela heads for southern France, apparently adrift and penniless, though the thinly explained clips from this period depict a lifestyle of sunny hedonism, swimming pools and embryonic film-making experiments. After finally finding focus and validation with his Spanish wife Elisa, a new sense of calm settles. As he becomes a father himself, the director starts trying to take stock of his own scattered family roots, interviewing both mothers on camera, and reconnecting with his vast network of African cousins and half-siblings.
Fortunately for Bandela, he has amassed a huge treasure trove of video diaries, home movies and faded snapshots covering his entire life and assorted families. This material multiples when he reaches adulthood and decides he would like to be film-maker, just as phone-cams and cheep digital video cameras become much more accessible. He blends this material in a free-form fashion into a non-linear, time-jumping collage of contemporary interviews, archive clips, still photos and semi-abstract visual motifs. Snowfall, rain and smudgy reflections figure prominently in this rich collage of stolen moments and flickering memories. In a rare but welcome piece of narrative context, archive reports from social workers and school welfare officers appear sporadically on screen, tracking young Mickaël’s journey from happy child to troubled teen to angry adolescent.
It seems uncharitable to critique a man who has plainly endured years of genuine emotional distress, but Bandela has a weakness for self-pitying melodrama that tests the viewer’s patience at time. His stream-of-conscious narration often has the over-sensitive pomposity of a teenage diary: “A river of tears, Paris is stifling me, I have the feeling that all of society is organised to ignore how difficult life is for me!” he protesst during one low spell. “This world disgusts me, I would like it to implode.”
Thronged by siblings and friends, Bandela appears to be a confident and handsome young man in these vintage clips, yet frequently bursts into tears when off camera, dutifully reporting each sob story in a tone of high seriousness. This performative ennui feels slightly contrived and needy but also, let’s be honest, very French. In fairness to Bandela, when he finally moves beyond self-indulgent wallowing and begins to show empathetic curiosity towards his two long-suffering mothers, he learns that they share similarly painful family histories.
One Mother is frustratingly thin on solid background detail, more a whirling mosaic of half-remembered events than a straight-talking bio-doc. Bandela could easily have given us more hard facts without weakening his highly stylised aesthetic. That said, taken as a semi-experimental visual artwork, this multi-media memory mixtape is consistently imaginative and pleasing to the senses, flowing and looping like a piece of audio-visual free jazz. Accordingly, music plays an usually prominent role in the film’s fabric, with Bandela’s own twinkly piano sketches nestled alongside Jeff Buckley, Verdi, Mahalia Jackson, Papa Wemba and more. The film’s theme is also hammered home with sledgehammer subtlety by several versions of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, the classic bluesy spiritual made famous by Paul Robeson, Odetta, Van Morrison and others.
Director, screenwriter, cinematography, editing, sound: Mickaël Bandela
Producers: Marina Perales Marhuenda, Xavier Rocher, Mickaël Bandela
Music: Thomas Schwab
Production companies: Ruska Films (France), La Fabrica Nocturna (France)
Venue: Dok Liepzig Film Festival (International Competition)
In French, Spanish
86 minutes
