The Taste of Mango

Official Selection, 2023 True/False Film Festival
Official Selection, 2023 BlackStar Film Festival

Somewhat early in her debut documentary THE TASTE OF MANGO, Chloe Abrahams, the film’s director and narrator, recounts an early bout of sleepwalking while visiting her grandmother Jean in Sri Lanka. Told over images of light bouncing over rippling water, Abrahams recalls “staying deep in the hills, sleeping outside.” When Jean finds her in a river and brings her back to bed, she ties a sheet to each of their wrists to keep Abrahams from wandering away. So characterizes the bonds rendered in THE TASTE OF MANGO, where, at the threshold between domestic scenes and elemental landscapes, dreams and everyday life, anger and tenderness, three generations of women are inextricably tied.

Set primarily in the UK, where Abrahams was raised and where her mother Rozana immigrated when she was 26 years old, a shared history of violence unfolds across family conversations in bedrooms, bathtubs, and gardens, backgrounded by Suren Seneviratne’s ethereal score and joyful bursts of 1970s country songs. An artist as well as a filmmaker, Abrahams brings a painterly approach to the film’s family portraiture. Drawing on the possibilities and limitations of the Handycam, each shot is a study of a loved one, some so up close and intimate the image breaks. Glittering shots of abstract elsewheres – undulating water, road dividers, the slow pan over a torn family photograph – gather the layers and textures of the once-unspeakable inheritances that have ruptured and shaped a family.

– Kim-Anh Schreiber

Filmmaker scheduled to attend.
Screening to be followed by Q&A.

Admission includes a pre-screening reception 5:20pm-6:25pm at The Patio next to Regal Edwards Mira Mesa Theater.

This screening is FREE for members of Pac Arts. Members can redeem their free ticket(s) online by using the code provided in the general membership e-newsletter. For any assistance, please email membership@pacarts.org.

Preceded By

what we don’t talk about

Directed by Melanie Dang Ho

As one Vietnamese family gets ready for a wedding, humor and affection combust suddenly into tension, rewriting the memories that came before.