Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.

In the here and now, the director observes her parents in the big empty house in the country: her hyperactive father who is constantly tinkering with something, and her chain-smoking mother who sits at the kitchen table and whose sharp mind can only be surmised from her eyes. What happened? What happened to the energetic and independent young make-up artist? The one who admires witches and wants to take a trip around the world. The one who could easily earn her own living but still gives up her job. “The gaze is important”, the now 60-year-old Valérie tells her daughter once while applying make-up. Yes, the gaze is important. And with her film, director Faustine Cros counters the gaze directed at her mother over all those years with a new narrative.

Leonie’s greatest dream is to become a pig-farmer. She spends a lot of time with her cat Skeet on her parents’ farm and helps where she can: taking care of the piglets or loading the pigs onto the truck to the slaughterhouse. But new laws make her parents give up the farm. The last pigs disappear and Leonie must say goodbye to her dream.

Julie lost her parents when she was still very young. Now she is 13 and has long since settled in her new home, with a family who loves her. Over the years she has managed to accept her fate. “Light” follows Julie for a while and shows a girl who, despite immeasurable loss, faces the world with her arms wide open.

Only light lifts the outlines of the world from darkness. In cyanotype, light-sensitive material is used to make white drawings materialize on a blue background. Tata Managadze challenges the light-sensitivity of our mind. She uses reflections and mirrors to expose the sensitive, gossamer-thin material of association in ways that make ephemeral memories and emotions visible. The poem at the beginning tells us how soothing and at the same time brutal her protagonist – light – can be. Like children in a playground, we are seduced by and forever searching for the dance of lights. Flower patterns on the dishes in the sink begin to spin when our eyelids grow heavy and sleep is approaching. Everything moves. In the transitory state between waking and dreaming, a different kind of life stirs in the prefabricated building estate: The stars of the restaurant leap from the sign and scratch traces into the wall. Or are these scars that must still heal? Perhaps scars from the Soviet era?
Again and again, well-known fragments are re-assembled. This non-narrative animated documentary takes us on a spiral of remembrance to an untraceable origin, building a bridge to our childhood ability to find magic in the most mundane things.

“Imagine this camera is your mother”, a father tells his daughter. In the 1990s, scores of families from the Republic of Moldova began a ritualised mail exchange between the mothers, who had emigrated for economic reasons, and their relatives back home. The former sent money and goods; the latter sent videotapes. These amateur recordings are the material of this film. They testify to the painful gaps the absent persons left in the lives of those who stayed behind.

Migration is a big factor in post-socialist states buffeted by recession and inflation after the end of the Soviet Union – and in this case, also by the civil war over Transnistria. According to data from 2011/2012, about a third of Moldovan children had one parent abroad. In this small country between Romania and the Ukraine, too, a higher percentage of fathers choose work migration. Otilia Babara, however, is specifically interested in the consequences of long absent mothers, who work for nursing services in Italy, for example, to earn their family’s livelihood, and who express their love through care packages. The loss of connection to their mother – all of whom stay out of the frame –, which affects girls in particular, emerges in the cracks of the staged home videos, when wandering glances reveal that the children no longer believe in their return.