Healing and family secrets unfold in 'The Taste of Mango'

BRITISH SRI LANKAN director Chloe Abraham’s debut feature, The Taste of Mango, journeys from personal anger and bitterness to empathy and love.

With a patient ear and unending curiosity, she captures the pain and resentment locked over years in family secrets.

Despite the difficult terrain and shattering revelations, what emerges is a transformative portrait of love and hope.

Filmed sporadically over five years, and during several trips to Sri Lanka, Abrahams delves into her family history to understand the gulf of silence between her mother and grandmother.

Armed with a camcorder and probing curiosity, Abrahams unravels this personal story buried for decades, sifting through photographs, albums, memorabilia and exploring the two houses – of her mother in England and her grandmother in Sri Lanka.

The treatment has a hypnotic cinematic quality as the images alternate between probing proximity and free spaces.

Her mother Rozana, cheerful and fun loving, is captured in intimate close-up sequences brushing and drying her hair or relaxing on the sofa with her albums.

There are scenes of intimacy as the physical proximity opens up to reveal the house and the space in which Rozana lives.

Abrahams combines the documentary style of the confessional with dreamy poetic images of the garden or the ocean and beachside in Sri Lanka. Her grandmother Jean exudes immense love for her when she visits the London home. Yet, there is a palpable wall of silence between Rozana and her mother.

What emerges is a delicate family portrait, the need of the filmmaker to be loved and to bring love to the two estranged women in her life. Rozana finds it difficult to forgive her mother for staying on in a marriage with an abusive man, who had at sometime abused her too.

Her mother says she stayed on with the man because of social pressures in the Sri Lankan village where she lived.

The director’s several journeys to Sri Lanka is to understand the context in which such decisions were taken and to see her grandmother in her own space.

The tropical light, the green landscape, the wide oceans bring the sense of an external and internal journey. The story of the mango that both women craved when they were pregnant offers a sense of smell and taste through the visuals. It is the link between the two women which then becomes the central leitmotif in the film.

Abraham deals with the difficult subject of family abuse, which in south Asian families, have almost always been buried under issues of family honour, shame and silence. The director’s own journey and transformation makes the film a document of courage and love, rather than one of anger and rejection. She makes a bold and honest story which is hypnotic and compelling in its telling, enduring in its belief in love and hope. The transformation in the filmmaker from blame to acceptance, from anger to hope, is the biggest take way.

Given the paucity of documentary funding in the UK, this is a rare gem by a woman director of Sri Lankan origin. The film and its story appeal to intergeneration audiences and taps on experiences of patriarchy and abuse which will resonate both from within and without the social context. Getting personal stories from the south Asian diaspora are rare in cinema and this outstanding film must be seen.

The feature debut won the Best Documentary Audience Award at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival. It also won the best debut director at the BIFA awards.

Taste of Mango, backed by the BFI DOC Society, is in cinemas.