My Grandmother Trelotótó review – following a lost family history from Mozambique to Portugal

A t nearly three hours, Catarina Ruivo’s sprawling documentary seeks to halt the march of death. When her grandmother Júlia died, she left behind a treasure trove of letters, written between 1946 and 1957 when she was living in Mozambique , then under Portuguese colonial rule. Read out by actor Rita Durão, this correspondence captures the hopes and dreams of a young woman, newly married and adapting to a foreign land. The voiceover is paired with Ruivo’s footage of present-day, independent Mozambique, images that breathe a second life into these messages from the past.

The juxtaposition between Júlia’s writings and the Mozambican cityscapes recalls Chantal Akerman’s seminal News from Home (1978) , in which Akerman combined her narration of her mother’s letters with languid shots of N