{"id":136857,"date":"2025-08-11T11:55:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T11:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/136857\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T11:55:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T11:55:12","slug":"my-grandmother-trelototo-review-following-a-lost-family-history-from-mozambique-to-portugal-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/136857\/","title":{"rendered":"My Grandmother Trelot\u00f3t\u00f3 review \u2013 following a lost family history from Mozambique to Portugal | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

At nearly three hours, Catarina Ruivo\u2019s sprawling documentary seeks to halt the march of death. When her grandmother J\u00falia died, she left behind a treasure trove of letters, written between 1946 and 1957 when she was living in Mozambique<\/a>, then under Portuguese colonial rule. Read out by actor Rita Dur\u00e3o, this correspondence captures the hopes and dreams of a young woman, newly married and adapting to a foreign land. The voiceover is paired with Ruivo\u2019s footage of present-day, independent Mozambique, images that breathe a second life into these messages from the past.<\/p>\n

The juxtaposition between J\u00falia\u2019s writings and the Mozambican cityscapes recalls Chantal Akerman\u2019s seminal News from Home (1978)<\/a>, in which Akerman combined her narration of her mother\u2019s letters with languid shots of New York City to reveal the intricacies of the mother-daughter relationship and the rhythm of urban living. My Grandmother Trelot\u00f3t\u00f3 doesn\u2019t quite achieve such cinematic alchemy. J\u00falia\u2019s letters, while seemingly benevolent, betray a colonial gaze that erases the hardships endured by the local population (a fact acknowledged by Ruivo in an artist\u2019s statement). The way Mozambique is framed \u2013 quotidian scenes full of anonymous faces \u2013 appears merely illustrative; it does little to complicate or push against J\u00falia\u2019s problematised point of view.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The lethargy of the Mozambique section is countered by video glimpses of J\u00falia\u2019s final years back in Portugal<\/a>, also shot by Ruivo. Here is where the film feels most reviving; these moments take in the older woman as she is, curious, active, and full of vitality. Ruivo also pays close attention to the rituals of rural life: painstaking scenes of dough being kneaded, and meal preparation. The documentary portrait could have turned into a protracted elegy if not for these sequences, which are filled with a dynamism more powerful than words.<\/p>\n

My Grandmother Trelot\u00f3t\u00f3 is at the ICA, London, from 15 August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At nearly three hours, Catarina Ruivo\u2019s sprawling documentary seeks to halt the march of death. When her grandmother…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":136858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-136857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115010009510721146","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}