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The pleasures and the pitfalls of a hybrid format are both in evidence in French actress-turned-director Romane Bohringer’s “Tell Her I Love Her,” a plaintive, affecting account of her struggle to come to terms with her mother’s abandonment, refracted through the similar experiences of politician, activist and author Clémentine Autain. With perhaps more ambition than rigor, her investigation leads Bohringer to layer meta-fiction onto auto-fiction onto docu-fiction, a scattershot approach that nonetheless gathers momentum and feeling as it goes. Finally, through otherwise potentially niche-interest personal histories, she accesses truths about mothers and daughters, memories and fallacies, that are far more universal. We cannot hope to fully understand a loved one whom we scarcely remember. But perhaps, through the act of remembering, we might better understand ourselves.

With a rather abrasive flurry of footage that creates a framing device out of TV reportage, home videos and an atypically precious voiceover,...

Romane Bohringer’s “Tell Her That I Love Her” unfurls not merely as a film, but as an act of intimate archaeology, a daughter’s painstaking excavation of maternal ghosts. Its conception, sparked by Clémentine Autain’s memoir of an identically titled sorrow, immediately signals a departure from conventional cinema. This is a work born from a shared wound: the premature loss of a mother whose life was a whirlwind of artistic ambition and profound personal struggle.

The film beckons us into an emotional terrain where memory is both a sanctuary and a minefield, a deeply personal quest to map the contours of a love irrevocably shaped by absence. It’s a quiet, insistent grappling with legacies that whisper from just beyond the veil of the past.

Duets of Daughterly Bereavement

The film’s structural conceit—a dual biography of grief—finds Bohringer not just adapting Autain’s narrative but...

British auteur and two-time Palme d'Or winner Ken Loach, whose new film Sorry We Missed You will hit U.K. theaters next month, was on hand at the Lumière Festival in Lyon for a master class much more dedicated to politics than to movies.

Appearing at Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux's annual gala of classic and restored movies, which is now in its 10th edition, Loach was joined on stage by French politician and feminist Clémentine Autain for a lengthy discussion about the state of the world, with a focus on British and European issues, including,...

British auteur and two-time Palme d'Or winner Ken Loach, whose new film Sorry We Missed You will hit U.K. theaters next month, was on hand at the Lumière Festival in Lyon for a master class much more dedicated to politics than to movies.

Appearing at Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux's annual gala of classic and restored movies, which is now in its 10th edition, Loach was joined on stage by French politician and feminist Clémentine Autain for a lengthy discussion about the state of the world, with a focus on British and European issues, including,...