Things of a lifetime, intimate archeological exercises

After her grandmother’s death, filmmaker Céline Segalini sets out to film the house she leaves behind. By observing, sorting, counting, and arranging the objects that fill the various rooms, she attempts to preserve what remains and to reconstruct, through these material traces, the portrait of a woman who has remained, in part, a mystery to her.

As this meticulous inventory unfolds, new facets of her grandmother emerge. Objects, clothes, mementos, and fragments of daily life become silent clues to buried stories. In their interstices, a larger memory takes shape, revealing French colonial and postcolonial legacies marked by racial and identity-based assignations.

Somewhere between a personal investigation and a historical exploration, the film transforms the domestic space into a sensitive space for reflection, where the acts of observation and archiving reveal what objects preserve, conceal, and transmit through time.