A single mother tries to hide her past when her teenage daughter pressures her to learn more about her origins in this refined immigration drama.
Caterina Mona’s Semret holds nothing new in the cinematic experiences but delivers a heartwarming and delicate story in a promising debut work with impressive newcomers: British-Eritrean Lula Mebrahtu as the titular character and Hermela Tekleab as her daughter, Joe. The film received its world premiere at Locarno Film Festival 2022 in Piazza Grande section, an open-air venue with one of the biggest screens in Europe traditionally reserved for prestigious and more popular titles. This year’s Locarno opener, American action comedy Bullet Train (starring Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Sandra Bullock) was shown in this section, and amongst them are Blandine Lenoir’s Annie Colère, My Neighbor Adolf, Medusa Deluxe and the star-studded Paradise Highway.
With immigrant-themed films feel overly familiar, some of them unfold a very different kind of its type. The 2022 Sundance U.S. Grand Jury Prize folklore horror Nanny is a haunting experience through a Senegalese immigrant who works for an upper-middle-class white family in New York, and in another case, the 2022 Bulgarian Oscar entry Fear sharply criticizes one town’s mentality with a funny spin on it. However, Semret seems to be familiar and director Caterina Mona does not try to shock her audience at some points. But there is something instantly appealing about Semret, whose stars Mebrathu and Tekleab turn this simplistic story into a confident portrait of a mother-daughter relationship where shame and trauma dominate how immigrants see themselves in a new society.
We can see the titular character as she works at a local Zurich hospital as a strong, persistent-independent woman but when she comes home, Semret became a fragile person who is haunted by her past. In her tiny apartment, Semret sleeps in the living room, and when she has a nightmare she moves to her daughter’s little bed. We can not see what’s haunting Semret all this time but soon we realized that Semret had a lot of painful years in her home country, Eritrea, before moving to Switzerland. All that she wants now is a proper life for herself and her growing up teenage daughter, that’s why she became more protective of Joe and avoids meeting people from her country. When Joe starts asking about her origins, Semret has to face the tragic memories of her escape.
In her first major role, Mebrathu works perfectly as the titular character, it is not groundbreaking but the performance was solid; blending melancholy fearful, and uplifting energy that turns Semret into an iconic character. It is hard to describe Semret without making it sound like the kind of gutwrenching immigration drama where the viewer loses sense of time because the film itself has no time for throwing a pity party for its characters. With contemplative and muted but tender, Mona’s style, which is plain rather than using certain stylistic choices helps temper sentimentality with its natural form.
A Swiss-based production, the director (whose short film ‘Persi’ was a part of Pardi di domani competition in 2015) brings her confident vision of Eritrean cultures and society into international cinema and shows a lot of assuredness in her first feature work. It is nice to see some new perspectives even though the narrative feels familiar. Semret was produced by Cinédokké, Cineworx Filmproduktion, and RSI Radiotelevisione svizzera and is scheduled to be released on August 25, 2022 in German-speaking regions of Switzerland. German-based Pluto Film are handling the international sales.
