FOR ONE HOUR MORE WITH YOU

My mother was born in 1938 and died in 1972, when I was 7 years old. I don’t have many memories of her, but I’ve always known that the whole visual memory of my family was locked inside a closet in my grandparent’s home. This closet contained old film boxes, amateur 16mm films that my grandfather shot between 1926 and the 70s.

It was only a few years ago that I dared look at those films for the first time, with great curiosity and strong emotion, especially those marked with an “L”, the initial of my mother’s name: Liseli.

As if by magic that misterious and unknown person projected on the screen in front of me seemed alive. In just a second I was thrown back to the past, in the time when my mother lived. My mother, whom I had known very little and forgotten for the most.

The film starts with the sound recording of a 45 rpm record with the real voice of my mother talking to me; it goes on interweaving readings of letters and private journals written by my mother and that of medical reports from hospitals where my mother spent several periods. Through those words it is possible to reconstruct her whole life in the different times: childhood, love, family, illness, existential malaise.