La deuxième nuit (2016) - full transcript

Voilà.

First comes the sound, as always.

Then, the image.

Only in cinema can you look

both the sun and death in the face.

One-on-one interview.

The second night

is the night of separation.

But there is a first, obviously,

which is the night following the birth.

Above all, it is a night of fatigue,

where, more often than not,

both mother and child sleep together.

And then there's the second night,

which is truly the night of separation.

This is when the child is separated

from its mother for the first time.

And more often than not, it cries.

It cries because it is alone.

Alone in paradise lost.

The second night

is usually when they are separated.

They are no longer 'one',

as they were for nine months.

This night is a lot harder.

The babies cry a lot more

and the mothers often need

more help and attention at this time.

The real problem is the second night.

The second night

is the night of true separation.

The night without warmth,

the night of solitude.

The child discovers a world

it has never known.

The child is afraid.

It no longer has the comfort

of its mother's belly.

It no longer has that contact.

The second night

is the night of the big leap,

the big leap into solitude,

into the unknown,

into what the child

will ultimately become.

The second night is the moment

when the child gets this strong feeling

that it is no longer

inside a living being,

that it's lying on a bed,

an inert, lifeless object.

Sounds are no longer the same.

It can no longer hear

its mother's heartbeat.

And the mother also feels

this sense of loss.

She hears the crying.

This is when the feeling of isolation

is most strongly felt

by the baby,

as well as by the mother.

Personally, when I had my first child,

this was something I felt strongly.

The second night was a vivid experience.

When I woke up after the birth,

I could hear my child crying.

I realized how alone, unhappy

and isolated the child must feel.

So I took action.

I didn't want us to be apart.

I wasn't wearing my night robe,

so my child was lying on my bare belly.

I did this so he could feel

the warmth and sounds of my body.

I think that it calmed him down.

Maybe it helped him

get through that second night!

THE SECOND NIGHT

In my childhood,

two beings consoled me

in my loneliness and my difference:

my teddy bear and my mother.

Now my mother is slowly dying,

my teddy bear is all I have left.

I carry within me

the memory of her belly,

and I remember

the warmth, the floating.

I remember her soft,

faraway voice all around me,

and the light shining through

her veins like those of leaves,

like the thick branches

of winter trees.

With every winter walk,

every tree, every sunset...

I remember.

It's all there, in my memory.

Those 10 months of joy,

awaiting the delivery.

A Wednesday in September,

the sun shining,

the light was so vivid,

the sky so blue,

as Wednesdays often are.

And far, far away,

I remember the cries of this woman

who brought me into the world.

I remember.

As with every snowfall,

I remember the cosmos

from which we all originate.

Facing the snowflakes

swirling about us,

as we stand in awe,

I remember the infinity of the cosmos.

I rediscover these shards of eternity,

long etched upon our memories,

which continue to snow

within each of us.

The history of my family,

as with all families, is chaotic.

In the beginning, we were all nomads.

Nomads from Mongolia,

who finally settled in Flanders,

where they all became Flemish.

Here I am

on my grandfather's shoulders.

I spent a chunk of my childhood,

thousands of hours,

on my grandfather's shoulders.

He was my mother's father,

my refuge and my fortress.

When he died, a long time ago,

I felt, for the first time,

the separation of death.

I missed those shoulders so much.

I missed those hands so much.

My grandfather worked in the docks.

He found my grandmother

in a container of bananas

originating from the Congo.

She was as black as coal,

with large eyes.

He thought her so adorable

that he took her home with him.

He scrubbed, and scrubbed some more,

until her skin turned white.

For years, the girl that was my mother

truly believed this really happened.

Finally, during the war,

she met my father,

a soldier in uniform only,

but who would later,

during the Cold War,

be accused of espionage.

In any event, they married.

One Fall night, I was conceived.

They expected me in early August,

so my father

took a whole month off work.

In September,

he had to leave on a mission.

I waited for him to leave,

to be born on a Wednesday in September,

after 10 months in my mother's belly.

This was by far

the best part of my life.

Long after my father died,

two objects of his remained.

The pistol he was ordered

to keep on him at all times,

which he would hide

under his pillow at night.

And his dynamo pocket torch,

a relic of a war he never fought in,

with the unique noise it made,

which I simply adored.

Vestiges and images

of my father remain.

And even a reincarnation.

I spent years filming an old man

walking his dog in my neighborhood.

Like my father,

he resembled an older Buster Keaton.

Then, one day, he too died.

I have no objects

belonging to my mother.

She was the universe,

the universe in its entirety,

the whole universe.

I had started my life within her.

Truth be told, I don't really have

any images of her, just sounds.

The sounds of lullabies.

Her voice.

And the time, which rolls by.

Then, one day, we were living in Paris.

I went to see the room

where I had spent hours

and days in bed when I was ill.

I remember being ill

and those long days indoors,

more often than not spent in bed.

Unhappy with being ill,

but happy with being close to her.

When she wasn't by my side,

I could hear her in the living room.

I could hear her walking the corridors.

I could hear her cooking.

The sounds

of the outside world passed by.

The shouts of grinders

and accordion ditties

floating through the streets.

One day, not knowing why,

I found myself in front of the mirror

in the small bathroom next to my room.

I stood there,

transfixed by my reflection,

weeping at my ugliness,

at my face which was so different,

with this terrible feeling that

I was being stared at long and hard

by the ugly boy in the mirror.

She opened the door,

saw my tears and held me.

She held me for a long time,

without saying a word.

She alone could console me

in my unhappiness and difference.

And I remember the first day

you took me to school.

Until that point,

nothing had separated us.

One day, you gave me a satchel

and sent me off to a strange place,

a class where there were

other children and a woman.

Then you said goodbye and left.

I stayed there alone,

alone among other people,

alone like I had never been before,

alone among these strangers.

I waited for your return.

It must have been a mistake.

You were going to reappear

and wave to me at the door.

But you never came back.

That morning, I understood that,

one day, I'd have to live without you.

I remember long afternoons in parks

spent sitting by your side on a bench,

without moving, without playing.

My brother and sister ran about,

riding bikes, roller-skating,

playing dolls and hide and seek.

The only thing I wanted

was to be next to you,

to watch the world beside you.

Today, I would like to film the world

as I once saw it in my childhood.

But that isn't really possible.

As an image gets closer to reality,

we make it seem even more real,

while as a child,

even as I looked on, motionless,

I remained distant,

contemplating from afar.

Day after day, she would leave.

Already, she wasn't really there.

She found it so hard

to remember what day it was.

Time no longer mattered to her.

She was already gone

and I was trying to hold on

to the gulf of time between us,

moving further away from me.

She seemed so far away already

that keeping her with us

was impossible.

She became so thin,

so small, so slender,

you would have thought

she was slowly vanishing,

as if to say dying was less painful

and less violent than being born.

She, the one who gave birth to me.

I often think back

to the image of a boat,

sluggishly leaving the quay

and heading towards the horizon.

The image of infinite slowness.

Until the point where the boat

becomes a dot on the horizon

and slips onto

the other side of the world.

Today, January 30th,

is the date of my mother's death.

She passed on,

that January Friday,

as a storm blew across the land.

That night, I wanted to film the moon,

to capture the memory

of its shape at that moment.

Then, night fell. The second night.

The second second night.

So, I started a fire,

wanting to melt into it.

To purify myself.

To leave a mark on me

and burn away this moment.

I think back to that day

you were sat by the entrance

to our apartment in Paris.

You were tired and depressed.

You were still a young woman.

And I was a little boy.

We'd just arrived

from the countryside, from Antwerp.

You were now separated

from your family and friends.

Paris must have seemed

like a large, cruel city.

That day, as you sat on a chair,

you started to cry,

to rid your heart of tears.

And I came up to you,

not understanding the situation,

awkwardly trying to console you.

I remember.

To explain your tears

all you could say

was that it was

the cruelty of others.

"It's nothing," you told me.

"Mommy is crying

because people can be so cruel."

And I would have done

anything to console you.

There I was, a little boy,

standing before my weeping mother,

not knowing how to comfort her.

Not only could I not grasp

the cause of your tears,

but I couldn't even open my mouth

to say something

that might have consoled you.

Perhaps it was to fill this silence

that today I speak,

I tell stories and I write.

It was this silence that made me

the film-maker I am today.

After her death,

I found a cardboard box

filled with all the postcards

I had sent her over the years.

Postcards from here and there,

of landscapes and the Madonna.

Few at first, then more and more,

above all when she was alone

after my father's death.

Over the phone, for each postcard

that ruptured her solitude,

she'd tell me she'd received it

and that she kept them in a shoe box.

"Later, they'll be for you," she said.

One evening,

as this thought crossed my mind,

I said that one day,

with all those images,

I might make a film out of them.

On the other side,

at the other end of the call,

I could hear her smiling.

Flemish artists

so often paint the Virgin with Child,

with a Child

who always resembles an old man,

and a Virgin

who is always eternally young.

It is only when

the paintings themselves age

that her face acquires

the wrinkles of time.

Centuries of paintings, then cinema,

have always depicted her as young.

The exception is Pasolini,

who had his mother play Mary

in his film

The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

"You are irreplaceable," he wrote.

"That's why the life you gave me

is condemned to solitude."

Albert Camus' The Stranger begins

with one of literature's

most lauded openings:

"Today, Maman died."

But in another novel,

The Adulterous Woman,

there are wonderful lines

describing the destiny of women,

which remind me of her.

At the end of a long journey,

the heroine arrives at her destination.

She stands in a Saharan landscape.

She climbs one of the dunes

and looks around.

It's the end of the day,

as she looks upon the desert.

Far in the distance,

she sees the nomads' tents.

And Camus writes:

"It seemed to her that

the world's course had just stopped

and that, from that moment on,

no-one would ever age any more or die.

Everywhere, henceforth,

life was suspended,

except in her heart,

where, at the same moment,

someone was weeping

with affliction and wonder."

With time,

I understood that all stories,

big and small alike,

as well as the stories

my mother told me as a child...

All stories talk about things

that have been lost.

After she had been lost too,

I didn't know what story to tell,

what story could speak

to this disappearance.

Though storytellers themselves

naturally disappear,

the stories they tell do not.

Perhaps this is why

it is always orphans who tell stories.

One day, while travelling in Spain,

we ended up watching a corrida.

While my father was filming,

we experienced, together,

the execution of this animal.

Together, we felt fear and terror

before this inconceivable violence,

watching this bloody animal

on the edge of the abyss.

With her at my side,

as both of us were shaking with tears,

I felt, for the first time,

a sense of purification,

a 'catharsis', wash over me.

When the animal died,

it felt like a liberation.

Now that you're dead,

I think back to the boy I once was,

happy, carefree and acquiescent,

but from time to time,

overcome by sadness,

not for very long,

but like the echo of past suffering,

moments of melancholy

constantly washed over me.

I grew up with this scar,

without putting a name to it.

Then I saw images

of the first separation,

the expulsion from paradise lost.

Then came the proof

that this final division was necessary

for us to become indivisible,

for me to become an individual.

We needed to separate

so I could find my place in the world,

to exist somewhere

other than the apple of your eye.

It took me so long

to resolve this contradiction,

to lose something

in order to be myself.

Every child experiences sadness,

and even a happy childhood

can also be a tragic one.

How can you accept this rupture?

How can you start speaking

and, one day, truly say 'I'?

In other words,

how can you live and then die?

The writer Robert Walser,

who said of himself that

the way he thought had something

which reminded him of a sparrow,

said that

death wasn't of much importance.

"Death is like anything else,

like picking ripened cherries,

like tobogganing in winter

or drinking a coffee."

One day, he wrote a short text

on a painting by Díaz de la Peña,

in which we see a woman

and her son in a forest clearing.

Walser imagines the mother

lamenting that her child is too clingy

and that it's time

for them to grow apart.

"To know how much you love me,

you must rely on yourself," she says.

"Then you will know what I mean to you.

As long as I stay with you,

I remain a stranger."

She finally adds:

"Though I am here with you

in this forest painted by Diaz,

you have to leave."

Because, Walser says,

"she knows she's in Diaz's painting,

while the child

has yet to realize this."

I remember the terrible storm

which started during a walk

in the forest of Fontainebleau.

When we were young,

you told us that storms,

that thunder and lightning,

were signs of God's anger.

He was angry with a thief

or someone who had done wrong.

But this particular storm

was a terrible one.

We were looking for lilies,

which blanketed the forest.

In a heartbeat, the entire forest

was plunged into utter darkness.

We were alone.

You, my brother and I.

Separated from the rest of the family,

lost and disorientated.

Under the beating rain,

enveloped by thunder and lightning,

you dragged us behind you,

not knowing where you were going.

My brother, in a state of panic,

kept screaming, "God, save us!"

I, the younger sibling, was plunged

into the worlds of make-believe,

into the terrifying forest

where Snow White lost her way.

I don't know how long we ran for,

through the sudden nightfall,

soaked to our bones,

but for the rest of my life,

the smell of lilies would remind me

of that storm and of you.

I remember her washing the dishes,

and I would help her dry the cutlery.

I was about 10 years old

and I didn't like her to be alone

in the kitchen after we had eaten.

She did the washing up

and I dried everything.

Later, when she remarked that

maybe this task no longer suited

the young adolescent I had become,

I used to read to her.

That was when I started reading.

The first novels I read,

the works of Maupassant,

I read them all out loud for her

while she did the washing up.

I remember the day

when I returned home,

fed up with university,

after studying a year of medicine.

My average grade for the year

had been more or less good.

All I had left

was to finish my exams,

but I no longer wanted to study,

to become a doctor.

I wanted to work in cinema.

During dinner, I announced

my decision to give up medicine

and begin my artistic studies.

My father, who dreamed of his sons

as a lawyer and a doctor,

stood up and left the dinner table.

We were alone.

My mother sat there in silence.

She also seemed

to disapprove of my decision.

Once the meal was over,

she started to do the washing up.

And without saying a word,

we began our former ritual.

After a while,

she turned to me and started to talk

about the photo

taken on her wedding day

of them exiting the carriage,

a photo we all knew well.

She said to me:

"You see this photo?

I'm not crying out of happiness.

That day, I realized that

I shouldn't marry your father.

We weren't suited to each other.

He was intelligent, hard-working,

but also too serious,

too cold and too distant.

When I woke up that morning,

I didn't want to go through with it.

I called my mother

and told her everything.

I was crying, as was she.

But she said it was too late.

It was all arranged:

the wedding, the dress, the carriage...

In an hour,

my hairdresser would be there.

It was too late.

So, I got married.

And here you are.

So perhaps that's how it should be.

But you should do what you want.

If you want to make films, make them.

Make films if that's what you want."

It was a second birth,

this woman who said to me:

"Just be yourself

and do what you want to do."

Her saying this

was all the more meaningful,

as she came from

the last generation of Western women

to have only raised children

and followed the wishes

of her father, then her husband.

Since then, this is all I've worked on:

being myself.

You see, making a film about you

is like making a film about freedom.

This is perhaps

the only photo I ever took of you.

The only image of you,

between the two of us.

On the back, I found

the traces of your handwriting.

It's dated on the day

of our last washing-up session.

ALL I WANT IS FOR YOU TO BE HAPPY

- MOM

Later, when I left to film

sacred dances in Asia,

you gave me some money

so I could bring back

the Buddha statues you loved so much.

So many things reminded me of you.

As a kid, during family get-togethers,

when one of us

tried to have the last word,

I often saw a hand go up

and mimic a pair of cutting scissors.

This gesture is from a story

the whole family knew,

a horrific story

you once told me about.

A husband and wife are arguing

about the circumstances of a murder.

The husband insists that

the victim was stabbed,

while the wife firmly maintains that

the murderer used a pair of scissors.

It's the evening.

They are having dinner.

And, as usual,

neither of them will concede.

He keeps saying, "It was a knife!"

And she carries on,

"No! It was scissors!"

Tired of the discussion,

the wife left the table

and went to run herself a bath.

But neither conceded.

From the living room,

he persists, "A knife! It was a knife!"

Meanwhile, in the bathroom,

she responds, "It was scissors!"

She's in the bath,

when suddenly,

he opens the door and shouts,

"It was a knife!

Will you finally admit it or not?"

She, unperturbed,

once again responds, "Scissors!"

He cracks, throws himself upon her,

pushes her under, and she drowns.

Then, with a final burst of energy,

just before she drowned to death,

her hand rises from the water,

and gestures a pair of scissors.

The gesture has been

in our family ever since,

and often, when one of us

tried to have the last word,

my mother would make

the scissors gesture with her hand.

When you gave birth to me,

you also placed me in death's path.

You, who knew what it was to suffer,

and the pain of childbirth,

you who knew, as all women did,

because all women had told you

about how they suffered,

about how all women had suffered.

Your mother, your aunts,

your grandmothers...

You knew what life was like,

how burdensome and painful it was,

but you also knew

how someone who has suffered

can erase it all with a smile.

You loved that Buddha statue so much.

Its smile washed everything else away.

But the most beautiful,

strongest, sweetest smile

wasn't from

a representation of a Buddha,

but from that of a queen,

a Khmer queen.

A mother.

For a long time,

she had been intrigued

by the rice paper wallets

from Asia that I used to use.

The wallets aged in contact

with hands and pockets,

and would be drab and faded

within a year or two.

I would then change it for another one.

I kept them all,

as markers of the time passed.

Whoever said that

films would change the world

never kept their word.

There was a time, long ago,

when knowing how to talk

and keeping your word were linked.

If you didn't keep your word,

if you lied, then you should shut up.

We only have one word.

There is only one word.

Image-makers, those who believed

in the power of images,

never should have promised anything.

It was you who first told me about God.

"Good God," you would say.

The being that created

the world with His word.

But if words created the world,

someone who lies could also destroy it.

You taught me to be free,

and today, that's my freedom

as a film-maker, not to lie.

No, no way.

That's one of the worst things

a film-maker can do

when dealing with death.

You gave me life,

a gift that cannot be refused.

If images were needed to show

how much you loved me,

then I'd need images

that I would never dare use.

A mother's hands rubbing sun cream

onto her boy's shoulders at the beach.

That too would be a lie...

But a true lie.

Summer holidays on the Flemish coast.

Every day,

no matter what the weather,

the soup van would pass by the seawall.

The van which served soup,

with the man who refilled the bowls

of holidaymaking mothers.

When it rained,

we went to the café at the cinema.

That was where,

as the waitress waited on tables,

with trays stained

with coffee, beer and ice-cream,

my mother introduced me to the cinema.

Charlie Chaplin.

Buster Keaton.

Laurel and Hardy.

Those are my first cinematic memories,

surrounded by food-laden tables,

with her by my side.

Of all the innovations she experienced,

the answer phone is perhaps

the one that surprised her most.

She never really got used to it.

When she would finish

recording a message for me,

she would always

say her name at the end,

like when signing a letter

at the bottom of the page.

Good evening, Eric, it's 6:30 PM.

I'm calling you now because

I'm expecting a call from Yaya.

That's why I'm calling now.

Maybe I'll wait to call you later...

I woke up early today, so we'll see.

I think you'll be leaving for a holiday.

Maybe this evening, Eric,

if you have the time.

Bye.

Mom.

You're no longer here,

but I know you'll live on within me.

You'll be there till the end.

In the end, we'll leave together.

Like we always did.

Like in the beginning.

Beginning and end

meet in a perfect circle.

Braque, the painter, said that

"art is a wound turned into light."

I returned from a film festival

and had told her about

one of the most impressive

documentaries I had ever seen,

depicting the daily happenings

of a murderer sentenced to life

for killing eight people.

He was never let outside

and all he could see

was what he saw

through his cell window,

somewhere in deepest, darkest Russia.

The only living being

he had a relationship with

was a spider

that had woven its web in his cell.

A tiny spider

which he fed and spoke to.

When I told my mother about this film,

she said that she too had a pet spider.

She showed me an animal

that had woven a web

between two branches of a potted plant

on the terrace of her apartment.

Every day, she'd watch it.

She must have talked to it

to relieve her loneliness

and fulfill the need we all feel

to have somebody with us.

She'd tell me about it over the phone,

whether the spider had come out or not,

what it had been doing,

if it had been hunting or sleeping.

A few years ago,

we had recorded a conversation

which we both loved.

A conversation between

a mother and her son.

The son became a Coptic monk,

exiled in the solitude of the desert.

He has been locked away,

alone, for many years,

praying in his sealed refuge.

His mother, now so old,

would like to see him

one last time before she dies.

She has walked for so long,

on her poor old legs, to get there,

to see her son one last time.

But he doesn't want to see her.

He refuses to open the door.

I've also brought you honey.

You won't let me leave with this honey.

You loved it when you were young.

It still tastes the same.

I won't leave with your honey.

That would be stealing!

Macaire, who hasn't said a word

in over a year-and-a-half,

continued to remain silent.

Aren't I your mother?

You could at least speak,

so I could hear your voice.

Then she heard something

akin to a child's voice:

"Your son is dead."

It was Macaire.

He pulled himself together,

and speaking in a curt tone, said:

"Mother, would you see me now,

or later in heaven?"

The old woman,

moved by the sound of a voice

she no longer remembered,

that brought back

memories of childhood and joy,

did not pay attention

to the meaning of his words.

She asked Macaire to repeat them.

"Mother, would you see me now,

or later in heaven?"

Now! Right away!

Yes, right now.

Will you open the door?

"I'd rather see you

in the times to come.

If I see you now, Mother,

I would become weak,

a prisoner to demons."

But if I don't see you now,

when will I see you next?

"If you're strong enough

to conquer your desire,

you shall see me in heaven.

We shall be together for eternity."

- Are you sure?

-"Yes, Mother."

I'm glad to hear it.

All the travelling I've done...

You've forgotten how tiring it is!

I am not in good way at all.

You said we'd see each other in heaven.

If you tell me once more,

I will believe you.

Macaire said nothing.

His mother carried on:

I'll go then.

What else can I do?

She knocked on the door again.

The honey! I forgot about your honey!

"Give it to a beggar.

You'll think you're offering it to me."

No, this honey is for you.

I'll leave it here,

just in front of the door.

Macaire said nothing more.

She stepped back

and passed the other cells,

opening her eyes wide

to see the place where her son lived.

She observed the roofs

and counted the palm trees,

carrying with her the images

of what her son saw every day.

She was now so old.

The long hours of walking

didn't matter much to her.

If she died from exposure,

she would ascend to heaven

and wait for her eldest son.

She thought:

I left home alone, so I return alone.

That's fine.

Did I think he'd return with me?

Yes, I really did.

He thinks he'll see me in heaven.

He will be most disappointed.

I don't like Paradise.

I don't want to go there.

The last time

I spoke of Paradise with my mother,

she didn't want to go there either,

because, as she herself said,

with millions and millions

of the dead there,

heaven seemed too full

to be a truly pleasant place.

Thinking about her

is like walking backwards,

going back in time

to when things began,

the time of 'first times'.

It's a journey, a return,

where memories act as counterpoints

outside of time and all logic.

I found this postcard of Antwerp,

from the time when I was born,

a musical postcard.

I remember those long summer afternoons

and the ceaseless rain.

We were on the veranda.

You were ironing clothes.

I was sitting on the wicker chair,

in my shorts,

hands on my thighs, completely still.

I remember it all.

The raindrops on the veranda windows.

The smell of freshly ironed linen.

The light of that rainy summer.

My immobile hands resting on my thighs.

Your father crossed the veranda,

came to a complete stop,

watched the rain fall, then said:

"Het regent ouwe wijwe."

"It's raining old ladies."

For many years, I wondered

where those old ladies were.

I remember that it was perhaps

the longest, happiest

afternoon of my life.

Just being there, not doing a thing,

in the infinite stretch

of that afternoon,

in that state of grace

and contemplation,

completely open to the world.

And all the warm summer rain,

and all the monsoons

in tropical lands I'd later travel to,

would take me back to that afternoon.

She was 89 years old.

She was slowly dying from cancer.

I had a cold

and was suffering from headaches.

I'm 60 years old and I realize

how good it feels to complain,

just as I did as a child,

and she would think this was normal.

When she's no longer here,

I won't have anyone to complain to.

In one of his novels,

Pirandello, the Sicilian author,

returns to the place where he grew up

and meets the ghost

of his deceased mother.

We often say to ourselves that

the more we think about the dead,

the more they come alive within us.

But what remains of her thoughts,

this mother who thought of us so much?

Pirandello tells his mother that

her death and absence

cause him to suffer

since she cannot think of him.

Because, he writes:

"If she thinks of me,

then I am still alive to her.

Now you are dead,

I am no longer alive to you.

And I never will be again,"

he says to her in the novel.

But she responds,

with all a mother's tenderness,

"Learn to look with the eyes

of those who can no longer see."

My mother, when she was in her teens,

lived in the bourgeois Antwerp home

where her parents worked as servants.

I don't want to leave her

without telling you about the monkey,

the story that so marked her life.

The son of this household,

a film-maker and explorer,

was returning from the Congo

and had stopped off to see his parents

before setting off again

on a boat for America.

He had two vans with him,

each of them containing

trophies, ivory and masks.

But there were also four monkeys,

which lived in cages

at the bottom of the garden.

After a few days in Antwerp,

there was a general strike at the port

and he was stuck there all summer long.

To my mother's delight,

it was the school holidays,

so she could look after the animals.

One monkey in particular,

a young baboon,

struck up a friendship with her

and they were quickly inseparable.

Nobody else could go near it

and it never let go of my mom's hand.

She cared for it, pampered it,

and cradled it to sleep.

She spent her days with it

and would eat her dinner quickly

so she could return to the garden.

The film-maker was surprised

by how close they had become.

But my mother had only one fear:

that the strike would end

and her companion would be taken away.

At the end of the summer,

people got back to work at the dock

and the fateful day of leaving arrived.

That day, with all the details

my mother told me a thousand times.

The van, the cage

inside which she placed

the screaming, wailing monkey.

The monkey taking

the hair clip from her braid.

The van leaving

and turning the street corner.

And her hearing the monkey's cries.

Sometime later, a telegram from America

announced that the monkey had died.

It died on the boat.

It refused to eat. It let itself die.

She never recovered

from this separation.

I didn't want this film to be a letter.

I wrote so much while you were here,

and you don't write to people

who are no longer here.

But if I could speak to you,

if I could pass something on,

something impossible to say

while you were still here,

it would be, "Yes, Mom,

everything up until you died

made me want to live, to love,

to watch clouds float across the sky."

It is also the aim of cinema

to watch time and clouds pass by.

In any event,

this isn't an unhappy ending.

It's the kind of film you like,

a film where all ends well.

It will be an end

which is not singular,

an end which doesn't end,

so I don't lose you yet again.

Once you were gone,

I realized it was thanks to you

that I knew I truly existed.

That is what you were,

from the very start.

The proof of my existence.

Now, I am alone and free.

A man who only has himself

as the sole measure of time,

with the happiness of experiencing

the wonders of the world around him,

the world which gave him life.

I want to leave you with music,

and end the film with my latest camera,

which is perhaps the best one.

It doesn't really film anything.

It blinks like the old cameras,

but it doesn't record anything.

It's a toy,

like dolls and teddy bears are toys.

The memory of the camera

is the memory of the cameraman.

It is up to him to remember

everything he has filmed.