Eskape review – stylish and personal tribute to a remarkable mother
Adeline Neary Hay's documentary about her mother's flight from Cambodia compresses decades of family history into just 70 minutes
Decades of family history are compressed down to a brisk 70 minutes in Eskape, the new documentary from Adeline Neary Hay that tracks the journey of her mother Thany Lieng (and herself, albeit as a three month old baby) in 1981 as she fled a Cambodia in chaos to find sanctuary in France. It’s a quiet and intermittently moving bit of biography, and even if the minuscule runtime doesn’t allow much in the way of additional depth or context, Hay’s daughterly love for her subject shines through in an affecting way.
Hay balances her focus between telling the story of the escape and giving us simpler, warmer insights into the life her mum lives now, with sweet and funny sequences of Thany haggling with a fishmonger or getting into a disagreement with the satnav. There is sadness shot through the piece as Thany reminisces about her traumatic departure from her home country, but Eskape is also full of optimism and hope as Thany recalls moments of kindness and gratitude.
These mother-daughter interviews are conducted in intimate close-ups, while Hay’s trip back to Cambodia (with her own young daughter in tow) is done far more through drone shots, set to a slightly ominous soundtrack that doesn’t appear in the France-set sequences. It’s a clever way of visualising diasporic alienation, Hay’s formal techniques providing the thematic depth that the content doesn’t really have the time or space to access.
Fundamentally, though, Eskape is not a piece of historiography or sociology, but a tribute to a mother who managed to build an enviable life for herself and her daughter half a world away from everything she knew, and the powerful but complex legacy that leaves.
Eskape is released on True Story on 23 June.
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