The Taste of Mango: a tender family reckoning

“Whenever I think of you, the taste of mango appears in my mouth. I’m transported back to all the times we ate them together.” With this opening address to her mother, filmmaker Chloe Abrahams ushers forth a stream of dreamlike images. The Taste of Mango, the British-Sri Lankan artist’s striking debut feature, is a domestic documentary portrait with a reparative and therapeutic purpose. Starting in the form of a love letter to her mother Rozana, The Taste of Mango zooms out to take in three generations of women and how they relate to one another in light of a dark secret of familial abuse. The taste of fruit, the sound of running water, the feel of a wedding veil: these sensory impressions become receptacles for memory – some of it painful, some of it pleasurable – and a means to process the trauma of gendered violence as it resounds across time. 

Working with home movie techniques – the aesthetics are lo-fi, intimate, hand-held, and confessional – The Taste of Mango finds moments of abstraction in its close-ups. Abrahams’s mother Rozana, the enigmatic heart of the film, is often framed in extreme close-up – she looks back at the camera defiantly, returning our gaze much like Jenny Runacre does in Stephen Dwoskin’s experimental film, Dyn Amo (1972). 

Jean, Rozana’s mother, is harder to read: beautiful but obstinate, she clutches onto decisions that she made out of fear, or fear of judgement. And then there is the director herself, who maintains remarkable poise as she holds space for these difficult conversations. The three women touch on differing attitudes to love and sex, abuse, female misogyny, and the painful realisation that loving someone doesn’t mean you can’t still hurt them. We feel Abrahams’s presence behind and in front of the camera: constantly adjusting the frame to bring herself (or her family) into the image; a reminder, perhaps, that this isn’t just one person’s story but part of a wider network of relations. 

At 75 minutes, the film holds back a lot more than it puts out and is all the better for it. Dreamlike but never ponderous, The Taste of Mango navigates challenging subject matter with subtlety, remarkable visual economy, and even humour, never getting too weighed down by the darkness of its subject matter. By coming together, the three women begin to find a way out of pain, something the film captures in propulsive images of forward movement: the open road whose direction is always unclear. 

► The Taste of Mango arrives in UK cinemas 29 November.