Interview With Director Chloe Abrahams (The Taste Of Mango)

An emotionally entrancing blend of video diary, essay film, and self-portrait, The Taste of Mango is a hard documentary to elaborate to an audience before they’ve experienced it for themselves. It’s a hard documentary in theme also, tackling topics of abuse and trauma to which there are no answers, only dialogues. It’s these dialogues that director Chloe Abrahams centres her film on, enabled by the distancing nature of filmmaking to turn her camera towards her mother, her maternal grandmother, and finally towards herself.

Abrahams’ film unspools gradually, capturing the joys, challenges, and nurtured, conscious empathy of familial life as it continues, not the pasts that have already been. Trauma can reshape us, redirect us, and distance us, but it does not define us or decide our futures.

When did you decide to construct a documentary out of these personal histories, and what was the first catalyst for you doing so?

In 2018, my paternal grandmother passed away. Nana in the film, my mum’s mum, was my last living grandparent, and I didn’t have a relationship with her. I felt there was something pulling me to want to reconnect, and I could feel so much resentment and pain from my mum. I wanted to help.

In a way, I felt like I had to do it. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure how I would be right now. There was so much that I needed to work through, and making this felt like the only way I knew how.

Had you decided the scope and the purpose of what you were shooting as you began to shoot it, or was that something that emerged from the process?

It evolved so much. When I began, I thought I was just going to make a short film about reconnecting with my grandma. Then I went and spent some time with her in Sri Lanka, and I realised it was so much more than that, and that I needed to keep filming.

It slowly evolved from spending time with my grandma in Sri Lanka, to inviting her to come and stay with us in the UK for a few months. Then it became more about my mum, and then eventually it became more about me. So it went through many iterations, even just the feeling of the film.

I had come into it with so much anger. But, by the end, that anger had transformed into something more loving, which I think is reflected in the final film.

What’s it like to share this film with the world? It’s so intimate, so personal and vulnerable, that it’s hard to imagine what it feels like for someone to not only produce that kind of work, but to send it out into the public.

I think, for me and my mum, sharing our stories is something that feels very natural. And whenever I connect with audience members after the film and people share their own stories, or how it’s moved them or helped them in some way, it feels so worth any discomfort of being so vulnerable.

Who did you make this film for? Is it primarily for yourself, and what the process of making the film can achieve for you? Is it for your family? Or is it for other people who might see glimmers of their own pasts and truths within it?

It came out of something that I wanted to do for my family and for me. As it evolved and slowly got bigger, I came to see how it could be for other people.

And not just people who had experienced any of the kinds of violence that we talk about in the film, but anyone who’s had difficulties talking and connecting with different generations of their family.

The first mentions of the specifics of these upsetting family histories in the film are offhandedly in conversation between you and your mum. What led you to reveal this information in the film in this way? You could have introduced it with a more traditional foregrounding of the topic, but you let it casually and gradually shift in, which feels more real.

I wanted these bits of information to come out as they would in normal life. The way that I learned these things growing up was not my mum sitting me down and telling me. It was overhearing bits of conversation, catching on to a word that someone says and putting the pieces together myself, as a kid hearing whispers around in the family.

I wanted it to be similar to that because, as you said, that feels more real. Otherwise, I’m doing it to tell the audience. It was more creating a feeling around what it’s like to pick up on these bits of information.

What was it like for you to work with these images on screen that are your own and your family’s histories, especially in the edit?

When I was making the film, I developed a kind of split between myself and Film Chloe. I would often refer to myself as Chloe in the third person and that helped me to separate myself, especially with things that was I was bringing up from my own story. But spending so much time with my mum and grandma, I really enjoyed being able to be close to them.

My grandma was only living with us in the UK for a few months. She went back, but it felt like she was still around. Even though a lot of the material that we were working with was difficult, it helped me to feel closer to her and to my mum.

Trauma can compromise or alter our memories. Was there a sense of reauthoring or reconciling memory for you by making this film?

That’s something that I was thinking about a lot when I began, and throughout the process of making the film, just how fallible our memories are in general and how trauma can impact that even further.

I wasn’t trying to kind of expose a certain kind of truth. I just wanted each of us to be able to say our own experiences and not hold each other to the specifics of anything.

My mum and my grandma, they have different ideas and different feelings about what happened. What I wanted to focus on more was the impact of that. Because we can never really fully grasp the truth of the past, but we can understand how our beliefs about those experiences impact us right now, and the reverberations that we’re still feeling. I wanted to focus on the way that we live around the violence, how the violence has impacted the fabric of our lives, but the joy and the hope that we have, despite all of that.

The film examines and discusses the past at length, but it stays consistently grounded in the present. How did you keep yourself in the now throughout the process and in the film?

It was hard to be present, honestly, because I’m spending so much time working through these past things. Having a wonderful support network, friends and a partner who helped me to stay grounded and present and not completely lose myself. And going to therapy and taking care of myself. These are important things to do, I think, with any filmmaking process, but especially with something that’s this personal.

How did your family feel about being filmed?

My mum was a bit awkward for about a minute and then she completely relaxed. She’s just so vibrant, and that’s what I wanted to show in the film. She would forget about the camera, because it was so small and because it was on quite frequently. Same with my grandma. It was almost as if there wasn’t a camera there.

The camera became invisible, but it was also a tool for me to ask questions that I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have a camera rolling. There’s some kind of protection there for me, whether it’s that tiny physical barrier, or this power that the camera has. It allowed me to ask things and to delve into things that I was too scared to before.

A decision that really impresses me is that you don’t show the perpetrator until very late on in the film. Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries, another documentary that I love this year, does similar. You’ve mediated his presence through the archival nature of the footage rather than giving a voice or giving over the image to him. The focus remains on yourselves.

Initially, I didn’t want to show his face at all. And in the rest of the film, there’s no men at all. It’s just the three of us and my mum’s female friends.

Speaking with collaborators, it did feel important to at one point put a face to this man who we’ve spoken about. But yes, to mostly keep it focused on us.

We are discussing violent acts by men, but the film is not about the men. It’s about the women, and the impact that [those acts] have had on us. It wasn’t about making any kind of change or getting anyone arrested, there was no impetus to do something like that. It was really just showcasing the ripple effects that this had.

In one moment in the film, your mother reflects on how, without some of these hardships, you wouldn’t have been born. In the same way, without these hardships, you wouldn’t have birthed this film. How does the film sit with you now, as an object and as a part of you?

That’s an interesting question, a big, existential question that I think about a lot. And I don’t really know how to answer it.

The way that I think about it is that I didn’t make this film trying to tell a story about violence. I didn’t want to sensationalise the violence. I think it’s wanting to sit with our joy and our life around that. But I know that’s not really answering the question much.

I don’t really know how to answer it, but it’s something that I think about.

An image in the film that lingers for me is your mother’s nails. You manage to capture a different colour in each scene.

My mum absolutely loves her nails and getting manicures and doing makeup. All these things are part of her way of caring for herself.

I’ve suggested a few times that she sees a therapist or a counsellor, and she completely rejects that idea. She doesn’t want to do that. But I noticed the things that she does instead to take care of herself, like taking baths, and especially doing her nails. Those things make her feel good, and they’re therapeutic for her.

I love that that’s a little thing that people can pick up on in the film, that they’re always different. She does them so frequently.

She usually wears a lot of makeup. But in the film, I catch her in bed in the morning, before she presents herself to the world.

The Taste of Mango releases in UK cinemas on 29^th November from Conic. With thanks to Chloe Abrahams for her reflections and insights.