Synopsis
Home is a Dollhouse is a personal documentary told through first-person narration, fictionalized reconstructions and filmed encounters between me and my previously estranged mother. Blending personal archives and imagined home videos, the film traces an emotional journey from silence to reconnection in the context of female narratives and transgenerational trauma. My mother, Adrienn left Hungary to become an actress in Los Angeles, leaving behind an abusive father, a volatile family, and eventually, me. While she pursued her career, I was passed between relatives in Hungary, including my grandparents, resulting in me living in over 25 apartments. We were eventually reunited, but we never spoke about why she left. I try to reconnect with her to answer the lingering question: Why leave me in the very environment she had struggled to escape from?
The visual language of Home is a Dollhouse recreates the fragmented structure of memory. I reconstruct scenes from my mother’s life as fictional archives, based on our conversations, trying to understand this period in our lives. The viewer slowly discovers that these archives are staged. As the film progresses, my mother becomes a collaborator: Should a scene be reshot to reflect her truth rather than mine? Alongside these reconstructions, I work with the fragmented material archives of my childhood (Barbie houses, napkin collections, diaries), objects my mother preserved, now scattered across storage units. I gather these remnants to restage memories and evoke the experience of a child growing up without her mother.
The visual language of Home is a Dollhouse recreates the fragmented structure of memory. I reconstruct scenes from my mother’s life as fictional archives, based on our conversations, trying to understand this period in our lives. The viewer slowly discovers that these archives are staged. As the film progresses, my mother becomes a collaborator: Should a scene be reshot to reflect her truth rather than mine? Alongside these reconstructions, I work with the fragmented material archives of my childhood (Barbie houses, napkin collections, diaries), objects my mother preserved, now scattered across storage units. I gather these remnants to restage memories and evoke the experience of a child growing up without her mother.
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