O, Dessa Kära Händer / Oh, These Beloved Hands

Abstract

80 years after a tragic accident, an ageing woman begins to mourn the father she never knew. Using an old dollhouse (a family heirloom) as a materialized interface between the protagonist and her unprocessed grief, the film follows Lisbeth Svenson and her son as they begin to explore the impacts of a trauma that reverberates through a family in the south of Sweden. O, Dessa Kära Händer | Oh, These Beloved Hands attends to the connections between grief, memory, ageing, and storytelling, demonstrating the ways in which grief is a deeply social process grounded in the concept of telling as experience. By engaging with memory objects, Lisbeth attempts to reconstruct her father through the grief experiences of her mother and older sister (both deceased), and, through these acts of story-telling with her son and granddaughter, she comes to experience it. Feeling this grief makes her, as she puts it, ‘a part of the family’.