POV, The Taste of Mango
PBS Western Reserve (WNEO 45.1 / WEAO 49.1):
Sunday, May 4, at 11 PM
Monday, May 5, at 4 AM
Fusion (WNEO 45.2 / WEAO 49.2):
Monday, April 28, at 10 PM
Saturday, May 3, at noon
This documentary produced by Abrahams and Elliott Whitton, is an enveloping, hypnotic, urgently personal meditation on family, memory, identity, violence, and love. The film traverses the precarious family dynamic between three extraordinary women: the director’s mother, Rozana; her grandmother, Jean; and the director herself. Their stories, by turns difficult and jubilant, testify to the entangled and ever-changing nature of inheritance and how we both hurt and protect the ones we love.
Director Chloe Abrahams utilizes abstract imagery and extreme close-ups in THE TASTE OF MANGO as she probes raw questions her mother and grandmother have long brushed aside regarding their traumatic pasts. Growing up in Sri Lanka, Jean was in love with Rozana’s father, “the only man who loved and protected her.” But that love match ended tragically when he died aged 27. Eventually, she married another man, providing young Rozana with a stepfather. This is a man who Chloe’s grandmother Jean is reluctant to discuss, despite remaining his partner four decades later.
Growing up in the UK, Chloe had always sensed pain within Rozana, and she’d heard fragments about Jean’s tumultuous marriage back in Sri Lanka. Now, as a young adult, Chloe spends time with both Rozana and Jean, in London and Colombo, Sri Lanka, listening to and recording their stories. What emerges is a delicately layered, personal and collective portrait of coping with physical and sexual violence, the strength of family bonds across time and distance, the damage of grief and estrangement, and the possibilities of hope, joy, healing, and reconciliation.
