Chloe Abrahams does not understand why her grandmother, Jean, does not leave her husband. He is suspected of paeodophilia and of raping Chloe’s mother, his step-daughter, when she was young in Sri Lanka. She was not his only victim, which Jean knows, but she steadfastly refuses to leave him.
Every time she comes to London to visit her daughter and granddaughter it is the elephant in the room but, as Abrahams grows up, she questions her grandmother more and more, sparking a reckoning that is the centre of hard-hitting new documentary, The Taste of Mango, screening in the Documentary Competition at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival.
The film, which runs at a brief 75 minutes, explores the relationship between these three generations of women, and how anger swirls around this precarious family dynamic, and trauma has passed down from generation to generation.
The opening of the film explains the title, as Abrahams says the taste of mango comes to her lips when she thinks of her mother Rozana, who gorged on the fruit when pregnant with her. Rozana didn’t tell Abrahams about her step-father’s abuse until she was 18, but, the young London-born director says, “somehow my body had always known”.
Abrahams had long sensed there was a dark secret in the family. Both mother and duaghter speak of sleepwalking and nightmares as children. Rozana is still scared to be in the house alone, even as she prepares to remarry.
There are very difficult moments in the film, including when Jean tries to defend her husband, saying many of his alleged victims were “frisky”. Abrahams silently shakes her head and tries to take deep breaths, the fury and disbelief raging inside her. It is the emotional crescendo of the film, and you’re right there with her, feeling the anger.
Beyond this confrontation, though, much of The Taste of Mango is based around shaky home video footage Abrahams captured while making the film. While the imagery of Rozana dyeing her hair in the garden or pruning her rose bushes may seem at odds to the film’s content, the real power of this seemingly anodyne footage is brought through Abrahams’ own candid admissions in her narration, and what we know was going on in their lives at the time.
But The Taste of Mango, which Sight & Sound called the number one film coming out of the True/False Film Festival earlier this year, is not an angry film. An earlier title “It Didn’t Start with You” was scrapped because it was too angry and, Abrahams says: “I wanted the film to reflect feelings of innocence and the naivety of adolescence, to evoke a sense memory, to make people’s mouths water.” There remains, despite everything, a deep vein of love running through it.
At points during the film there are needle drops that a cynic would say are too on-the-nose but it seems to be a benefit of a budding young Abrahams filming dozens of interactions with her mother and grandmother on her grainy Sony camcorder. In one sequence Abrahams catches her mum in the bath singing Coward of the County by Kenny Rogers, in another it’s the motherhood ballad No Charge (“For nine months I carried you growing inside me – no charge”), there’s also Stand By Your Man by Tammy Wynette and Can’t Help Falling in Love by Elvis Presley.
Abrahams’ film reaffirms the strength of generational bonds and champions the desire of the new generation to question and provoke and demand answers.
It is a bittersweet and frank look at the impact of inter-generational abuse, the culture of silence and women coming to terms with their own history. And it could well take home the prize for Best Documentary.
