Rebecca Ressler & Lara Porzak
United States | 2022 | 28 min
World premiere
Language : English
Subtitle : French
In 2016, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist Marianne Wiggins suffers a sudden stroke and must move in with her daughter, Lara Porzak, an artist herself. Lara undertakes to support her mother, helping her to complete her new literary work while filming. This intimate and painful huis clos sketches out the gentle intricacy of family relationships.
In 2016, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist Marianne Wiggins suffers a massive stroke and must move in with her daughter, Laura Porzak, an artist herself. A renowned photographer and compulsive in her own way, Porzak undertakes to film her mother, and to support her as she completes her new literary work begun a decade ago, hoping that this process will help her recover her cognitive faculties. In 2020, when Laura Porzak comes across Rebecca Ressler (the co-director), they decide together to make a film using the existing material, which will join other images showing both of them. Marianne intimately and painfully sketches out the gentle intricacy of family relationships, in a huis clos that reveals the charisma of two touching and brilliant women, overflowing with humour – particularly when the mother explains to her daughter that she is a genius, and the daughter replies by alluding to how it is difficult to hold the camera while vomiting… What remains is a unique, unrivalled filial love, and creation, in a film that manages to touch on the ineffable through its very form.
Émilie Bujès
