The film is a family chronicle of three generations. It is based on a secret that was recently revealed in the family and that has reshaped our understanding of who my grandmother was as a person. Through my grandmother’s story, which is told through the memories of her children, the film reflects on the consequences of mental illness, on not being able to have a choice of one’s own and what this does to a person. It is about what a human life means, and about the memories that remain when that human is no longer around to speak. Most families carry their secrets, in mine it concerns a child given away for adoption. The film is my way of zooming in on an individual’s destiny to speak about a collective experience.

Långsamt rör jag mig i din riktning follows three generations at once; grandmother, frozen like a shadow figure in a memory, I who in the present look back on the past and wonder what happened, and my father and his sisters who become a steppingstone back to the past. In the film, I try to map my family’s history connected to Finnish Ostrobothnia, where my father and my aunts act as a bridge between the present and the past, Sweden and Finland. With the help of interviews, archive material and my own film material, I have begun to recreate a memory of my family’s history.