Reflective Encounters

“Misremembering is just one tool the human mind resorts to when prompted to handle the fluidity of one’s past. Unintentionally, one rewrites their own history and when the objective reality of past events is shared by more than one person, each of them can recount what seems like a parallel universe of memory fragments. In Abada, a self-contained but uncompromising short by Jean-Benoît Ugeux, a father and a son continuously fail to agree on a singular version of how their relationship unfolded. For instance, the father remembers his time at a commune as a much happier one than his son, who holds on to the experience of disappointment and disregard. The conversation itself is not angry but their words tremble with the assertiveness of both their recounts.

Memories, as painfully subjective as they can be, are also the most infallible device for relationship formation, and the way one retells a certain story to another leaves its own mark in the process of reminiscing. Father and son seem much more alike in their unwillingness to give up on the way they (mis)remember things, and cinematographer Florian Berutti captures this unlikely resemblance well by framing them in a tight 4:3 ratio, even when they try to flee the frame.”

— Savina Petkova