The Nannies
2021 · 22m · DK
Directed by Signe Barvild Stær
Genres: documentary
Tones: melancholic, tender
A filmmaker whose mother died when she was five traces the years she cannot remember by interviewing the successive nannies who cared for her family.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Stæhr's film earns its formal inventiveness — the performative staging of nanny testimonies — because it is finally a film about the impossibility of knowing what we most need to know.
Filmmaker's childhood reconstructed entirely through nannies' memories — she's absent from her own story. Palm Springs Staff Pick. Sharp ethical and formal frame.
Vimeo Staff Pick at Palm Springs ShortFest 2021 — Stæhr reconstructing her own childhood through the competing memories of nannies, with herself absent from the events. The structural ingenuity is the grief.