Bridgeport, January 17, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examine the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, the film will explore the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.
This is quite a sympathetically shot docudrama that looks into the mysterious death of a young girl. She is found hanged and everyone assumes that she took her own life. As we receive the results of the post-mortem examination, though, we discover that perhaps all is not as it seems. It’s told from the perspective of the director (Miryam Charles) who happened to be the victim’s cousin and using a combination of facts and a really quite evocative performance, she tries - a decade later - to find out just what happened and, more speculatively, why? It was Tessa (Schelby Jean-Baptiste) who died and her life, or a possible version of it, is presented to us as we try to not just garner some clues but also to envisage how she might have lived her life had she survived. The film uses an intimate style of photography to take us into her character and I found that quite affecting and sometimes incongruous given what we already know to be true. The family originally hail from Haiti so violence is never far from their minds, but so too is a beautiful island that offers a degree of hope, too. Of return? Of hoping never to? It’s a slow burn but that seems to facilitate a deliberate act of remembrance tinged with sadness and peppered with joy. It’s also quite an odd film to watch: it doesn’t really conform to anything I’ve seen before as it deals with grief, bewilderment and it offers us no definite conclusion. Worth a watch, but expect something that’s more of an extract of life than a story in itself.