The Long Journey Home

A bit of reinvented truth. A child with a story full of holes, can only reinvent for herself a memory. Of this I am certain. Therefore the autobiography in all of this can only be reinvented.  Memory is always reinvented in a story full of holes as if there is no story left. What to do then? Try to fill in the holes — and I would say even this hole — with an imagination fed on everything one can find, the left and the right and the middle of the hole. One attempts to create one’s own imaginary truth.
Chantal Akerman

In her 2004 comedy, Tomorrow We Move, Belgian-born filmmaker, Chantal Akerman created what has been termed a ‘Marx Brothers film made by Erich Rohmer’: Charlotte, a writer of erotic fiction, finds herself constantly interrupted by her newly widowed mother, who has come to live with her. Realising that they need a bigger place they are forced to open their cluttered, private space to a flow of potential new tenants. During the course of this invasion a diary belonging to Charlotte’s grandmother is discovered in a cupboard. Mother and daughter read its contents and are put in direct touch with the generation destroyed in the Shoah. In a moment of tenderness the mother turns and kisses her daughter.

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