Starting with a goodbye, the film follows young Nelly as she comes to terms with the loss of her grandmother, through understanding her mother Marion’s loss – by meeting her as the child she was! Together the girls (played by twins Gabrielle and Joséphine Sanz) build shelters: real ones of logs in the woods, and a dreamspace of storytelling in Marion’s childhood home, where Nelly is staying in the present.

This film invents the grandmother rule, where time is a feminist circle and what matters is how we imagine together to live through grief and into a future of love. In the words of a wise six-year-old viewer: “Are they in the past – or the future? How did they get there? I don’t care. I like it when things are a mystery forever, because then one day you can work it out. It made me feel happy because the friends were playing together. They flipped the pancake onto the sink! I liked it a lot. I’d like it if I could do whatever I want.” 

Text by So Mayer.

This screening will include an introduction by writer and feminist film curator So Mayer.