Starring: Zuli Rosenow, Ilene Sulivan, and Deborah Tighe.
Bonds of Grief is an emotional, open-hearted piece about what loss feels like.
As someone who is familiar with grief, I can tell you, dear reader, that this film, from the USA, was incisively truthful (if slightly dramatic).
Written by Steve Meredith, this tells the story of Isabela (Zuli Rosenow), who loses her mother to cancer. Soon after the burial, she goes to her mother’s grave to read out something she wrote but never got to read to her. As she begins to read, she becomes inconsolable. A woman who is standing at a nearby grave notices this, and approaches Isabela, looking to comfort her. This leads to them having a comforting, honest conversation about what they are feeling. In doing so, Samantha (Ilene Sulivan) brings Isabela onto a process whereby she can explore her grief.
Bonds of Grief is deeply realistic in how it explores the pain of loss, and not just that of losing a parent. The fact that it explores grief, in the form of dialogue, from a number of different perspectives is brilliant, and a great creative choice.
Technically, the film isn’t particularly innovating, but it is solid, and the choice not to focus on making it visually particular helps, in this case, keep the focus on the story. Under the direction of Zay Rodriguez, it is almost documentary-like in this respect. The performances are good overall, but for a story like this, more naturalistic work would have been preferred.
Can grief ever be shared? Will we ever be able to truly understand each other’s grief through our own? These are really interesting questions, that if you are lucky this will be the case later in life, become increasingly important as we grow up. It’s important to mention also that not all cultures process grief in the same way. Bonds of grief showcases the Western, and specifically American, way of moving through it. The main point being that it always, invariably, requires support and the reminder that you are cared for.