“Listen, Grandma.” These words appear on a black screen, a summons that feels more like a pact than a simple instruction. Before any image emerges, there is a clear call to pay attention. Next, the first image surfaces and does so without flourish: in a fixed frame, an old woman is seated amid a room where life has been packed up —boxes, bags, bedding, a stool with a pair of sandals. A bright red sheet draped over a box commands our attention; it is a rectangular blaze that both hides and announces its contents. The woman props her left arm and leans forward just enough to demonstrate that listening requires posture.
A tape plays. A woman speaks in Arabic, and initially, we cannot understand her. Subtitles appear only for the listener’s interjections—“That’s true!”, “Thank God!”, “Yes, yes.”—so our comprehension depends on the muscles of the woman’s face. Eyebrows become punctuation. Nods operate as cuts. Minimalism here is not austerity but rigour: the image remains still long enough for listening to become visible. The film is radically modest about what it shows and radical in what it allows us to perceive.
Only later do we learn that the voice on the tape is filmmaker Fairuz Ghammam’s, recorded for her grandmother but never sent, and now played back to her in person. The unsent message is the film’s essential element. Oumoun treats cinema as a technology of belatedness—a way to hear what could not be heard in time. If films sometimes are containers, this one is also a relay: between voice and face, between Tunisia and Belgium, between the intimacy of presence and the ache of absence.
Because we lack translation at first, attention shifts to the listener’s body, whose understanding proceeds at the pace of breath. She listens with practical tenderness, often nodding, sometimes raising her eyebrows in surprise or affirmation. When the tape ends, her first verbal response is beautifully specific: “I have pulsations in my eyes… because of the rain,” she says, lifting her hand towards her brow. The world presses into the body; the body responds in pulses. Then, swiftly, she moves across the small continents of everyday life. She wonders whether Fairuz is working or studying. She asks if her granddaughter is happy to be back in Tunisia and complains that it is too hot. She notes, with the weary expertise of experience, that taxi drivers charge foreigners more—“They think Belgians are rich”—and then circles back to logistics: “How did you get here from the airport—train or taxi?” Ageing is mentioned in passing—“I used to do the chores around the house. Now I can’t because I’m too ill.”—but not lingered on. It becomes one topic among many in a life that refuses to be reduced to any single condition.
The film appears to be one fourteen-minute take, yet it is full of edits, but these only occur in the grandmother’s attention. Each change of subject functions like a cut, while the spatial continuity holds. Rhythm is produced in the body rather than on a timeline. Gesture becomes syntax: the sweep of a hand sketches a noun; a shrug renders an adjective; the planted arm underwrites a clause that will not fall over. The camera doesn’t harvest images so much as host them.
Oumoun is a film about communication that refuses fluency as a prerequisite for intimacy. There is a language gap—at one point, the grandmother asks whether Fairuz understands her—and yet there is a clear desire for shared meaning. Offscreen, the filmmaker mostly withholds speech. It is not an absence so much as a space made for another’s sentences to find their shape. The room’s clutter collaborates: boxes and bags serve as practical archives, a domestic topology of movement between places, economies, and years. And then the red sheet—the film’s most insistent abstraction—holds its place as a chromatic question. What is covered? What is on hold? The image both shelters and promises.
“Does it capture images?” the grandmother asks, glancing toward the device. The question is literal and philosophical at once. What counts as an image here? The film’s answer is: duration. When speech outruns comprehension, time itself does the translating. The camera waits long enough for the listening to take form. We watch the labour of attending—the forward lean, the murmured assent, the brief recoil of surprise—until this presence itself becomes the picture.
Later on, at the grandmother’s request, the recording returns, this time with subtitles. What was once private now comes out in the open. We finally understand what, earlier, we could only infer from the listener’s face: the granddaughter’s embarrassment at not speaking Arabic well; her frustration at resorting to gesture; her wish to know a life in its own terms; and the pivot that grounds the project—“Tell me and I’ll make images. Image is the tool I know best.” It is a moving proposition because it admits a limit and, in the same breath, offers a gift. Where words fail, images are made—not as compensation, but as continuation.
The opening words, “Listen, Grandma,” could just as well be “Listen, granddaughter,” or “Listen, viewer.” The film models a form of attention that edits ourselves as we watch. We learn to read hands; we see a red sheet as both cover and invitation; by now, we know: listening is time. When the grandmother wonders whether the camera captures images, she is also asking what will be made of her words. Oumoun’s answer is patient and exact. It does not catalogue facts; it records the energy of relation, the way a voice touches a face across countries and years. In the end, the pact holds: we listened. And because we listened, an image—quiet, durable, sufficient—came into being.
