Premieres Monday, April 28, 2025 at 11 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app
POV explores generational trauma in director Chloe Abrahams’ feature debut, "The Taste of Mango." The documentary is an enveloping, hypnotic, urgently personal meditation on family, memory, identity, violence, and love.
The film traverses the precarious family dynamic between three extraordinary women: the director’s mother, Rozana; her grandmother, Jean; and the director herself. Their stories, by turns difficult and jubilant, testify to the entangled and ever-changing nature of inheritance and how we both hurt and protect the ones we love.
Abrahams utilizes abstract imagery and extreme close-ups as she probes raw questions her mother and grandmother have long brushed aside regarding their traumatic pasts. Growing up in Sri Lanka, Jean was in love with Rozana’s father, “the only man who loved and protected her.” But that love match ended tragically when he died aged 27.
Eventually, she married another man, providing young Rozana with a stepfather. This is a man who Chloe’s grandmother Jean is reluctant to discuss, despite remaining his partner four decades later.
Growing up in the UK, Chloe had always sensed pain within Rozana, and she’d heard fragments about Jean’s tumultuous marriage back in Sri Lanka. Now, as a young adult, Chloe spends time with both Rozana and Jean, in London and Colombo, Sri Lanka, listening to and recording their stories.
What emerges is a delicately layered, personal and collective portrait of coping with physical and sexual violence, the strength of family bonds across time and distance, the damage of grief and estrangement, and the possibilities of hope, joy, healing, and reconciliation.
In "The Taste of Mango," Chloe draws on her experience as a portrait painter and video artist, to tell her story in a unique singular and assured cinematic language. Incorporating raw camcorder footage, she toggles toward metaphor, dwelling suggestively on textures, and pushing close-ups further than technology or physical autonomy can bear. Her voice-overs – in direct address to her mother – dialogue with a haunting soundtrack, alternating between Suren Seneviratne’s dreamlike score and 1970s American country songs.
Filmmaker Quote:
“Making this film began as an impulse and a desire to mend the relationship between my mother and grandmother,” said Director Chloe Abrahams. “Over the course of five years, it became clear that it was a necessary process to heal deep wounds in myself, too. POV has a track record of showcasing artful, character-driven documentaries, and I have long admired the curation of this series. It's an honor to share this film, a real labor of love, with POV audiences across the U.S.”
Watch On Your Schedule: POV "The Taste of Mango" will be available to stream until June 27, 2025 at pbs.org, and the PBS app.
Credits: A Cardamon Films and Fit Via Vi production. Chloe Abrahams is the director, producer, screenwriter, chief cinematographer and editor. Elliott Whitton is a producer, and Diane Quon, Kellen Quinn, Martha Gregory, Hannah Bush Bailey, Robina Riccitiello, Bill Way, and Erika Dilday, Chris White for American Documentary are the executive producers. Stella Heath Keir and Isidore Bethel are the editors. Suren Seneviratne is the composer and Eli Cohn is the sound designer.
