Divorced
2013

French Version with English subtitles.

We did not fall for the vain temptation of defining love, endlessly sang in poetry, described on prose and reflected in philosophy. As to what concerns family, there is no consensus about the origin of the word, nor its definition. Wikipedia presents one of its meanings: “an invisible set of functional demands which regulates its members’ interaction considering it also a system operating through transitional patterns”. We find it a very wide satisfactory meaning under the scope of contemporary family mutations, quite contrary to the definition suggested by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

This French anthropologist suggests that "family arises from the moment there is a marriage, and consequently there are spouses and children as a result of the union." In our opinion this is an outdated significance, since marriage doesn’t hold anymore the exclusiveness of the origin of family bonds, notwithstanding that it is a sacrament in most of the cultures and many mating rituals can be included there. With present time’s evolution of society, new family configurations appeared. It is true that single parent families largely result from the rupture of marriages, but they derive too, from the possibility a woman has to generate a child independently. And there is also the rainbow family, consisting of a homosexual couple with one or more children, not necessarily fruit of a marriage. There is the stereotype of the happy family, living together in harmony, and on the other side there is the dysfunctional one, or even the one where, for a number of reasons, hatreds are generated.

There are countless dysfunctional situations yet we can’t resist recalling Greek mythology in the figure of Erigone, the daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. [...] That is why we really believe that within a family, whatever structure it may have, the common denominator lies, indeed, on a functional framework which manages the interactions among its members. The narrative we have created starts with the video "Divorced" in which the author, Mireille Loup, a particularly good actor, embodies a group of various women in their forties who raise their children alone.

Rui Prata in She Loves me, She Loves me not, catalogue of the festival Encontros da Imagem, Braga, Portugal, 2013.

Cameraman: Héloïse Gousset.