I’ll be your mirror

Johanna Faust, doc., 91 min., CH 2019

Nominated for best film editing, Edimotion Festival 2021

To what degree can motherhood and self-fulfilment be reconciled? Johanna Faust would like to leave her children and her husband behind in order to pursue her artistic career. But when she gets an invitation to study art at Oxford, doubts arise. Johanna vaguely remembers painful stories that her mother told her about her grandmother. Didn’t she leave her family, too? And what were the consequences? In search of an answer, Johanna and her family embark on a journey into the history of her family, which takes them from Switzerland through the USA to the Mexican desert. «I’ll be your mirror» is the intimate portrait of three generations of women, torn between social norms, children’s needs and their own desires.

Johanna feels increasingly lonely and unfulfilled in her day-to-day life with her partner and their three children. She longs to immerse herself in her art again. An invitation to study for a master’s degree at an art school in Oxford presents the perfect opportunity. But can she really leave her children? Is a mother allowed to do this? Her partner supports her decision and would look after the children, but Johanna still has doubts. She has dark memories of her grandmother also leaving the family at a young age to devote herself to art, with dire consequences for Johanna’s mother. But what did really happen back then? Johanna feels that she must first get to the bottom of her own family history before she can make a decision about art school. With her husband and children in tow, she embarks on a journey deep into the past that takes her from Switzerland, to the United States, and to the deserts of Mexico. Layer by layer, memory by memory, she unveils the stories of four generations of women, all of whom have struggled with their roles as mothers, with social norms, and with the painful, often-unresolvable conflicts that inevitably arose between their own desires and the needs of their children.

«I’ll be your mirror» is an extraordinarily personal road movie about a taboo subject. With unsparing honesty and captivating imagery, the film explores how intergenerational traumata can unknowingly, and profoundly, impact our lives.

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