In places that are points of contact between past and present, intimate conversations unfold between a grandmother and her granddaughter: by the sea, at an amusement park, and among carefully sorted memorabilia. In intimacy, two women – one of them filmmaker Cordula Rieger herself – explore a blank space and hesitantly draw outlines out of the haze. Their hesitation isn’t a fear of contact, but rather a respectful giving of their time to one another.

When a box labeled “Edith” is finally opened, a narrative of a train accident that occurred in 1985 on the line from Le Havre to Paris is pieced together from camera shots and (half-)sentences. “An experience that helps us understand something in life,” explains the grandmother. Her granddaughter responds: “So, do you think I can understand it?”

The intimately documented moments between Cordula and her grandmother are interspersed with a staged train journey that takes place in the present. Here, Cordula herself is traveling on a crowded train to Paris when it suddenly makes an emergency stop. As the train abruptly brakes, reality reverberates in the fiction. It finds an echo chamber in the sudden standstill, where the issue of reality vs. fiction can expand further while also reaching its limits: How can we understand each other in and through shared moments?

By empathizing with these possibilities of documentation and fiction, as well as their fault lines and connections, Liens familiers succeeds in utilizing absence to enable tender conversation and personal encounters. The story rejects abbreviated accounts of strokes of fate and, instead of dramatic revelations, opts for a cautious exploration of caesuras; it achieves an awareness that two people need not share the same level of concern in order to achieve mutual understanding.

Program Education through culture, forum at “Jordan Misja” Artistic High School.