The Taste of Mango review – powerful memoir of family secrets in Sri Lanka

The mango taste is bittersweet in this documentary-memoir of family pain and secrets from film-maker Chloe Abrahams. Using a small digital videocamera and her smartphone, Abrahams records intimate, candid conversations with her mother and grandmother, and the resulting movie is a lucid, emotionally honest account of trauma that lies beneath the smiles of family photos and wedding videos.

Abrahams shows the crisis of loyalty and agony of an abusive marriage, but shows also how the generational trauma can be healed when the generations come together. It’s a quietly powerful film to put, perhaps, alongside Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard or Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias. Abrahams is resident in the UK and her family background is Sri Lankan; her mother was abused by her alcoholic stepfather back in the old country – that is, the man her grandmother married after the death of her first husband. This man almost certainly raped her when she was a young girl (there appears to be some slight doubt about the culprit’s identity due to the crime taking place in darkness, though this doubt may have been fostered by the family members themselves to prevent them confronting the full terrible truth). And there is an impossibly painful moment when the film shows her own wedding video in which this man, her abuser, is shown giving her away with everyone locked in an emotional prison of silence.

Abrahams is angry at her grandmother for continuing to stand by this abuser for 40 years (she ironically plays Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man on the soundtrack); angry perhaps also at her mother for not confronting her mother more directly. But she is intensely compassionate also, with moreover a buried trauma memory of her own. Abrahams’s film-making language has a supple informality and immediacy, revealing what you might call the unofficial drama of family life, the guilt and pain which she has brought out of the shadows.

• The Taste of Mango is in UK and Irish cinemas from 29 November.

• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html