A cream and two plains

In A Cream and Two Plains (2002), the Australian filmmaker Damian Gascoigne captures his mother Rosa’s perspective on her home of more than 30 years after she has decided to sell it. ‘Plying her with red wine and cigarettes’, Gascoigne elicits her stories of raising eight children in the house, as well as her perspective on her husband’s unexpected passing 12 years earlier. In this nostalgia-soaked treatment, Gascoigne melds this narration with scribbly animations, family videos, dreamlike black-and-white imagery, the tumultuous noise of childhood play, and a poignant piano and string score. This eclectic collage of sound and image emerges as an appropriately incomplete meditation on memory and the meanings and interwoven emotions that a family home holds.