At nearly three hours, Catarina Ruivo’s sprawling documentary seeks to halt the march of death. When her grandmother Júlia died, she left behind a treasure trove of letters, written between 1946 and 1957 when she was living in Mozambique, then under Portuguese colonial rule. Read out by actor Rita Durão, this correspondence captures the hopes and dreams of a young woman, newly married and adapting to a foreign land. The voiceover is paired with Ruivo’s footage of present-day, independent Mozambique, images that breathe a second life into these messages from the past.
The juxtaposition between Júlia’s writings and the Mozambican cityscapes recalls Chantal Akerman’s seminal News from Home (1978), in which Akerman combined her narration of her mother’s letters with languid shots of New York City to reveal the intricacies of the mother-daughter relationship and the rhythm of urban living. My Grandmother Trelotótó doesn’t quite achieve such cinematic alchemy. Júlia’s letters, while seemingly benevolent, betray a colonial gaze that erases the hardships endured by the local population (a fact acknowledged by Ruivo in an artist’s statement). The way Mozambique is framed – quotidian scenes full of anonymous faces – appears merely illustrative; it does little to complicate or push against Júlia’s problematised point of view.
The lethargy of the Mozambique section is countered by video glimpses of Júlia’s final years back in Portugal, also shot by Ruivo. Here is where the film feels most reviving; these moments take in the older woman as she is, curious, active, and full of vitality. Ruivo also pays close attention to the rituals of rural life: painstaking scenes of dough being kneaded, and meal preparation. The documentary portrait could have turned into a protracted elegy if not for these sequences, which are filled with a dynamism more powerful than words.
