A bluish fire on the verge of dying out opens Chloë Delanghe’s hybrid documentary. The howling of a dog echoes over the dialogue of two British soap opera voices. Then there is a cut to black. A shaky hand zooms in on a woman in her forties who, nestled in her worn velour armchair, introduces herself as Sally Kovacsik. Her taped finger fidgets restlessly, and her thinning hair is combed back. The camera seeks out the light that penetrates Kovacsik’s living room like grass in a crack in the concrete. 

Snow and noise spread intermittently across the soundtrack. While the camcorder repeatedly loses focus, Kovacsik utters a few platitudes. She stumbles over her sentences, swallows them, and seems to have difficulty taking her own words to heart. Her asynchronous words and sentences never cohere, even though Delanghe seems to aim for precisely that in her formal experiment. Behind all the half-hearted speech lies a mother who, amid clutter and pain, is trying to create a home in the absence of her daughter. (Flo Vanhorebeek)