“Dear grandma, you’ll be surprised to hear my voice in your language…” Those are the first words in a recorded, spoken letter that was never sent, but instead played aloud in real time by the Brussels filmmaker to her elderly grandmother in Mahdia, Tunisia. In the presence of the camera, these lines turn into a voice-over which gradually transforms into a dialogue across languages, cultures, and generations.

Gestures consists of a continuous dialogue between what is shown and what has been obscured. The work focuses on the gestures and expressions of a depicted person. The sound of her voice is the indication of a possible narrative; nevertheless, this story remains fragmented. The distant glance of the camera struggles as it attempts to capture a fundamental moment between mother and daughter.

Saying Not Said portrays two mother-daughter relationships of immigrants of Filipino descent living in Europe. The four women, including the artist, engage in a dialogue on screen, each at a different moment in their lives. While one daughter has acquired her mother’s language, the other has not. The film is a personal effort to trace the intimacy and knowledge that arise from the verbal and non-verbal, the grammatically incorrect, and the words unspoken.

A poetic documentary in the form of a letter from a son to his mother, but read by her to him. What begins as an attempt to tell her story, slowly transforms into something else.