Valentina Chamorro Westergårdh and Alexander Westergårdh | Bortom (Distances) / 2014

through a glass darkly

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valentina Chamorro Westergårdh and Alexander Westergårdh (screenwriters and directors) Bortom (Distances) / 2014 [18 minutes]

 

The Swedish short film Distances begins with an interesting premise, a mother Eva (Monica Albornoz) who has left her hearing-impaired son David (Gabriel Nal) behind in Sweden returns from her homeland after a long period away to discover her son is gay and has a kind and knowledgeable lover Simon (Robert Ingvarsson).

     The mother-son relationship is openly fraught, mostly because of her abandonment, but also but her still limited knowledge of signing. Even on this visit she has returned mostly to obtain some papers from the Embassy that she needs to remain in her home country. And David’s bitterness in response her irregular visits, her inability to fully communicate with him, and her refusal even to find the time to spend a full day with him and Simon becomes quite apparent, particularly at a barbecue she has arranged with her former neighbors.

     The film might have been a fascinating work is generational abandonment and miscommunication if we simply knew something beyond their current situation. Why does Eva keep responding that she’s done the best she could, when she obviously has left her own son behind? Why has she returned to her home country, and where is that? Was she in trouble in Sweden? Did her husband divorce her or die?

     The questions keep mounting the more she and even her angry son keep expressing their frustrations and cliches.

     Even Simon, who can sign well and has evidently been a stabilizing force on David’s life, is crowded to a busy background, where former friends who we know absolutely nothing about come to dominate the scene.

 

   Nothing is fully explained or even explored, and presumably the mother will rush off in a day or two returning only after long periods. So now that David is well and in a strong relationship why should we even care about his missing mother or, for that matter, even his well-being.

    To give Eva credit, she does indicate that she was simply a cleaning woman in Sweden while back in her homeland she was someone of worth. But we need to know what she means by that, why she continues to stay away from the world her already isolated son inhabits.

     Distances is not only a film not that refuses to explain the relationships of the characters but remains almost impenetrable about its own narrative. It is as if the film itself were demanding we know some language which we have not even been told we needed to unlock the significance of the lives the work is attempting to portray.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).