Directed by Mary Stephen, veteran filmmaker Mary Stephen digs into her own family past to uncover the long-hidden origins of her Western surname, revealing a story of culture shock, colonialism, and contested remembrance.
Heading into Palimpsest: The Story of a Name you very likely won’t be expecting quite how far Mary Stephen manages to unravel her family history. Moving across different continents, through multiple generations, marriages, deaths, poverty, wealth, illness and adoption. Their family’s story is certainly far, far from being simple which makes for an interesting tale. Especially because the tone which Stephen employs is one filled with curiosity, a thirst for knowledge and truth, it’s charming and welcoming.
Within that is a wide variety of topics and personalities, which comes with a fantastic selection of archive footage and imagery. The vast library of footage which Stephen had access to for Palimpsest: The Story of a Name is fascinating to watch, and it’s well cut together to add context and a personal touch. Especially with Stephen’s narration, which has a lovely warmth and reflective note.
However, the one key thing which Palimpsest: The Story of a Name struggles with is just how far it unravels. At a certain point it becomes quite difficult to track everything, and instead of unpacking the layers we’ve already seen, it’s quickly moving onto the next chapter. Ultimately, that leads to scenes blending into one another and weakening its impact. As well as making the film quite slow in its latter half.
Palimpsest: The Story of a Name holds a lot of charm and warmth. It has a good style and a seemingly endless stream of archive footage and imagery, which is lovely to watch unfold. There are a lot of nice personal touches, and a good amount of personality. However, it ultimately begins to blend together in the latter half as it becomes tricky to keep track of all the people involved with changing names and multiple parties involved. It’s an interesting watch but the themes at work could have been explored more rather than simply continuing the constant stream of new information.
