Histoire d'un secret
Mariana Otero
2003 - 90 min - DV Cam & PD150 - France

When I was four and a half years old, my mother disappeared. Our family told my sister and me that she had gone to work in Paris. A year and a half later, our grandmother told us the truth : she had died of an operation for appendicitis. Later, during our childhood and youth, our father did not speak to us of our mother, except to repeat that she had been an extraordinary painter and wife. He had locked her pictures in a cupboard and put away the photographs in a drawer that we were forbidden to open. Although I sometimes disobeyed, I never really showed any great curiosity for this person who had been my mother and whose face I did not even recognise in the photographs.
Seven years ago, our father decided at last to speak to us about our mother. And he revealed the real circumstances of her death. This secret that my father had carried alone for 25 years had prevented him from telling us about her life and showing us her work. By breaking the taboo, he gave us back our mother. But the silence and the lies had erased from my memory the very memory of her disappearance. I felt the need to find again the one who had been torn away from me doubly by death and by the secret.