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.

Valentyna and her bed-ridden mother live on a small farm surrounded by the evergreen, lush flora of the rain forest. The works and thoughts of the poet and the artist, though, are filled with the landscapes of their old home, Ukraine. Memories of snow and birch trees, thistles and orchids, vegetable gardens and their animal residents come to life in Tamara’s poems and Valentyna’s drawings.

Life flows quietly in the small house in the middle of nowhere. Valentyna takes care of the few animals, milks the cows, makes cheese, cares for her mother. The photos on the chest of drawers, the allusions to the Chernobyl disaster only hint at why the two left Ukraine a long time ago. But what they left behind still lives in exile. One wonders whether she, the celebrated poet, still remembers her writings? Mother and daughter are as gentle with each other as the film’s gaze on the two women, their animals and surroundings. Without a trace of nostalgia, cinematographer Mariano Maximovicz’s images let us see not only the beauty of the landscapes we live in but also of those that live on in our minds.