Two pieces of news change director Caroline Guimbal’s life at Christmas: Her mother Natalie has cancer and she herself is pregnant. She follows Natalie over a period of two years, entering into a dialogue that extends across several levels. On the one hand, Guimbal films her mother in close, delicate shots, listens to her memories, documents her close connection with nature and the gradual decline caused by the disease. Another conversation is conducted offscreen, a conversation with herself that recounts experienced brutality and abuse: It is about all the men who beat up and exploited her mother and who have also left their mark on the daughter’s childhood and adolescent memories, not least on the recurring pattern of her own relationships.
“The Red Moon Eclipse” is a bitterly sensitive portrait that examines the conditions and simultaneity of events. Like a blood moon, which describes a total eclipse of the sun where sun, moon and earth are aligned, Caroline Guimbal draws lines: between mother and mother, daughter and mother, past and present. What is left at the end is the question of love – true love and love that only pretends to be true and usually causes pain.