MOTU MAEVA

In a bird-warbling prologue, we skim over the green and dense water to reach an undefined piece of land, an old woman’s wonderful cobbled-up shelter, a timeless off-the-map place. Motu Maeva is the name of that island from where happy memories, as well as some others we guess are more painful, will spread out: a beautiful life-long trip across Africa, Asia, Polynesia. Without troubling about using any chronology or following a specific route, going as memories arise and mix without hierarchy great moments of the existence and small anecdotes, this portrait, in the form of a trip or a survey, follows an unceasing movement. We jump unexpectedly from Chad to Indochina, then to Tahiti. We stop for a moment, listen to a song, then set off again a few years later, or before. That’s where the beauty of Motu Maeva lies: a total freedom, with no required stop, only trembling images captured on super-8 film and the voice-over of a woman whose civil status or secret wounds we’ll never know. Free from the commonplaces of travel stories, biographies and family sagas, indifferent to the weight of history in the making and to the great upheavals of the 20th century, Maureen Fazendeiro, in her fragile heroine’s footsteps, offers us a genuine outline, a painting of another time drawn with the utmost simplicity. (CG)