Content warning: This article includes discussions of rape and sexual violence.
The Taste of Mango focuses on the family trauma of its director, Chloe Abrahams, and how we decide to fully capture the power of telling these important stories. This film never feels like an exploitation of trauma, but rather a safe space to explore the tensions that lie within the difficulties it causes within familial relations.
The way The Taste of Mango confronted generational trauma in a delicate but masterful way – especially through lingering memories and personal moments – really stuck with me. This retelling of sexual trauma and its effects on the psyche left me to mediate on my own experience as a woman in a world, and how abuse inflicted on women by men is rarely reframed and retold like this.
Thankfully, I got to personally discuss this debut feature film with its very own upcoming talented director, Chloe Abrahams.
The use of the documentary style to depict an intimate story like this interested me, so I asked Abrahams “Why did you choose this documentary style instead of a fictionalised retelling? Do you think it reveals more raw moments?” Abrahams then began with an early memory, detailing “When I was growing up, in my late teens, a lot of new things came to light. I remember thinking wow this is such a crazy story, it even sounds like a movie”.
!When I started getting into film it did crop up in my mind whether I wanted to explore this through fiction, but whenever I saw my mum speaking about her story, she spoke so openly and was so captivating on camera. It just felt like it had to be her telling her story”.
Abrahams seemed particularly passionate about the deliberate choice of this style, expressing the personal weight of this project, telling me “Not only that, the act of working on this and asking these questions was also part of the process of me going on this healing journey and trying to understand everything that had happened. I’m not really sure how that process would have gone with a fiction project”.
The delicate process she describes struck a chord with me, so I followed down this route asking, “When you were putting all this personal footage together in the editing process, did you gain any new perspectives or feel anything cathartic when seeing the final product?”, to which Abrahams described their “rollercoaster of emotions” whilst making the film, explaining “I think a moment when I discovered something really cathartic happened was close to the end of editing, my mum had been loosely involved in the edit so I’d show her cuts and we’d talk about it”.
Abrahams then recounts a moment with her mother that moved her once the film was finished, telling me that “We rented a screening room in London, and we took a bunch of her friends, who you see in the film [all her female Sri Lankan friends] and we went and watched it with them and some of their daughters. I’d known these women my whole life, I call them my aunties even though they’re not blood related, but I’d never heard them talking the way that they did after the screening. It was like this thing had been opened up for all of us and we were finally able to open up to each other about all these experiences that we’d had. In that moment I realised there was some power in the film, not just for our family but for other people watching it”.
This visceral experience led us onto discuss the intimate use of voiceovers throughout the film, which I said I loved and mentioned that “specifically, when you mention how you and your mother rarely say, ‘I love you’, which reminded me a lot of generational trauma within families. When you were making this film, do you think this helped you explore that and how it manifests in family dynamics?”.
Abrahams seemed pleased about this question, explaining “That was kind of the big impetus for why I wanted to make it, I could feel that there was something lingering in me from something I hadn’t even experienced myself. All of the ways my mum had been impacted had reverberated into the way she raised me, and I was beginning to think about having a child and I really didn’t want those things to be carried through to the next generation. That’s why I started making it to begin with”.
Abrahams then begin to detail the long process of making the film, placing emphasis on how “It wasn’t a kind of instant thing at all, the film took me about 5 years to make. I didn’t think it would take that long when it began but I’m glad it did in the end because I needed that time to be able to work through everything”.
This extensive filming process sounded like the film existed in a liminal space for some time, so I proceeded to ask about the film’s length and whether or not Abrahams felt as though they had an end goal – “Did you finish it when you felt like you had fully gone on a journey and discovered something new?”. They followed up with “Yeah, it’s hard to know with a documentary when it’s done and I think there’s some part, in terms of the story, where it could have kept going, like including me having a baby. It also could have ended a lot earlier as well, but it came to point where I was like ok, I feel like this is not mine anymore.”
It then seemed like Abrahams had a sudden revelation, telling me “Yeah, maybe it’s that I felt like I’d done what I needed to do, and it was ready for it to belong to the world and not to me anymore”.
After this, we delved deeper into the difficult nature of managing boundaries with sensitive topics like these. I mentioned that the way Abrahams presents conversations between her and her family being tender and special, asking if it was hard to draw the line of what was too personal and what wasn’t – “or did you want to keep everything in to keep it as real as possible?”. Abrahams then articulated “Each of us had our own boundaries of what we wanted to or didn’t want to include, I think it was just about respecting our individual boundaries. I think for each of us for each of us there were differences in what we found difficult to share”.
Abrahams specifically pointed out her mother, telling me “My mum was the most open and wanted everyone to know the full story. I felt like I got some kind of bravery from her sharing it, and the way she shares so openly. She has this belief that sharing will help other people too, and I think we’ve come to see that with sharing the film with people, I think I followed her lead really”.
Following on from that, I knew that the impact of a film like this would be special, so I asked “Through sharing this film with other people, have you had any responses that have truly impacted you and made you glad that you made the film?”. Abrahams’ tone in their response represented how meaningful the responses were for her, but decided to share one in particular:
“Every single screening there’s been at least one person who shared something personal, but one that sticks with me was at the world premiere at the film festival True/False in Missouri (US). There was this audience member who just had tears streaming down their face and they waited to speak to me afterwards. They said that they had been abused when they were a child, but they didn’t want to tell their parents because they didn’t want them to blame themselves. Now after watching the film, they know that they’re going to talk to them, and were so grateful for having experienced the film. I always go back to that moment because it feels really powerful and that’s all my mum and I wanted”.
On the note of this beautiful encounter, we ended off the interview with a slightly personal question on how the film will directly impact herself. Abrahams herself has just revealed on her socials that she has recently become a parent, and so I enquired “Did making this film reframe your idea of motherhood and how you’ll take these lessons forward in the future with your own experience of being a mother?”.
Abrahams told me, “I think it just helped me work through a lot of the fear I had. I think I was scared not just of men, but I think I would have ended up very protective like my mum”.
Abrahams then beautifully ended with how the film has affected them and their future relationship with their child, explaining “Going on this journey of working on this film, I feel really surprised at how relaxed I feel as a parent. I’m sure that’s going to change, I’m only 6 months in, but I feel comfortable knowing that I’m not going to be a perfect parent and that’s ok. I hope that I’ll create a relationship that feels open”.
The Taste of Mango is a film that is a must-watch for those dealing with the troubles of grasping with trauma and the repercussions of it, but is also a beautiful depiction of the hardships within family that could bring anyone to tears.
The Taste of Mango is in UK and Irish cinemas now.
