2011 I 18’ I 16 mm Color I Stereo
Sound: Simon Fisher Turner
Supported by: Filmstiftung NRW
Production: Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln
An alchemy of one man’s image and another man’s words. A portrait that maintains its right to stay a mystery. A song, a riddle, an owl, frozen shoreline, urban savannah: fragments of brief encounters with wild and urban creatures and tender gestures in unsettling environments. A tribute to men full of secrets.
“In the first part of the program, experimental films were presented—works linked by idiosyncrasy, peculiarity, and genre indefiniteness. The program opened with the German film The Sweetness of Mother’s Hair (2011), directed by Jane Debus. This film is an alchemy of image and word embodied in a portrait of a man living on the margins of society, a Canadian Indigenous man. It is a film that defends its right to mystery and, at first glance, reveals almost nothing to us.
The main protagonist wanders through wilderness intermittently disturbed by the encroachment of civilization, and through his monologue seems to communicate with the spirits of his ancestors, with nature, and with the animals that appear at moments in the film. The Sweetness of Mother’s Hair is a visual poem—a mystery full of astonishing moments, a film composed of scattered fragments of a life and of its relationship to a world that is irreversibly disappearing.
Unobtrusive in direction, mysterious, and unsettling, this is a film that pays tribute to a man whose way of life seems to be evaporating in the face of the advancing urbanization of the world he once knew.”
— Nikola Strašek, Criticism and Essays, Zagreb, Croatia