The Taste of Mango
Kirsty Asher on the pursuit of reconciliation.
We return to VOLUME 21: The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend 2025. Today, associate editor Kirsty Asher introduces Chloe Abrahams’ 2023 film memoir, which skilfully interpolates home video footage into an rumination on matriarchal bonds and sexual abuse.
Chloe Abrahams’ mother appears to the audience first in gauzy haze; uncertain, in extreme close up. Then, her eyes lock onto the camera with a hard gaze that softens, the smile out of frame but implied. While the footage runs, Abrahams’s voice describes how her mother has passed down foodways learned from her own mother on the proper way to eat a mango, which gives this film its title. From the beginning, this touching anecdote of food lore introduces the link between these three women of Sri Lankan heritage, two of whom now live in the UK, of shared knowledge passed through generations, which will open their familial bonds up to the audience in more complicated and painful ways.
Recorded on a handheld camcorder, this personal piece of archive establishes the tone of Abrahams’ film as one of lo-fi home video familiarity, which complements the older archive she also utilises. The consistency of camcorder footage and its vintage quality speaks to one family’s issues and secrets rooted in a past not yet confronted. Abrahams sets out to clarify difficult emotional opacity, and bring forth emotional healing.
For those who have never embarked on such a personal documentary project, it could feel impossible to imagine the experience of placing three generations of family trauma, including one’s own, into a feature length film through such intimate footage. Yet the ready access to personal archive allows for frank discussion of the family’s timeline as it is gradually unspooled across the film’s run time. While extreme close ups pore over a family photo album, her mother’s voice gives the unseen context behind the smiles and poses - ‘That’s probably a year before I got beaten by my stepfather,’ a shadowy figure also known as ‘That Man’. The camera then drifts across the photo album to a picture of her grandmother where the other half of the photo has been very purposefully torn off, then pans across to another with the same treatment. The page is turned, revealing two halves of a photo which have been torn in half but put in the photo book side by side, evidently with someone missing from the centre of the image. A complicated family history is silently laid bare through these still fractures.
With subtle application, the archive speaks for itself as much as the film’s subjects do, gaining an intriguing rhythm as it progresses. Dreamlike sequences of B-reel accompanied by fluttery piano music are followed by a hard cut snapped back to her mother, shot on iPhone, discussing her family. There is a beautiful transition from her mother in the present day, sitting at the table in her London home contemplating, acknowledging and smiling at the camera, to the stylised recording of her wedding day. Her striking kohl-rimmed eyes admire their own reflection and acknowledge the camera’s presence in a mirror. Abrahams’s recollection of her parents discussing divorce accompanies a forced smile as her mother looks once again into the camera via her own reflection. A shot flipped down from a POV on a cycle ride to the relentless extreme close up of white lines on a fast moving road is set to her mother, in the present day, quietly discussing the violent beatings her stepfather subjected her to. This leads to an extreme close up of one of the ripped photos of Abrahams’s grandmother, where she gazes at ‘That Man’ no longer included in the frame, the man she has chosen to stay with in Sri Lanka for forty years instead of joining her daughter in the UK.
Through acknowledgement of trauma and betrayal comes acceptance, as Abrahams’s mother asserts, ‘You can’t change the past, you just have to live in the present.’ The purpose of a film like this, which uses such deeply personal historical archive, is to allow the past to breathe. It takes shape as an artistic endeavour to express love, sorrow and anger in the pursuit of reconciliation.