In last year’s inaugural Future//Present, VIFF’s eight-film series devoted to emerging Canadian filmmakers working with small budgets and in alternative forms, Toronto DIY director Sofia Bohdanowicz was the programme’s first major success story. Her debut feature Never Eat Alone (2016) was awarded the Emerging Canadian Director award and went on to have a respectable run on the international festival circuit despite being rejected by TIFF just months before. Earlier this year, coinciding with the world premiere of her new film Maison du bonheur, a highlight of this year’s Future//Present, the Buenos Aires Film Festival carried out a retrospective of Bohdanowicz’s accomplished body of work.

The most concentrated distillation of her form remains the Last Prayer Trilogy (2014). With “Modlitwa (A Prayer)”, Bohdanowicz filmed her final meeting with her paternal grandmother before she passed away. The director contextualizes this initial kitchen sink document along the spectral gamut of legacy and mourning, moving us from presence to absence to memory over three progressive shorts. The second film, “Wieczór (An Evening)”, shot over one day in the home with Bohdanowicz’s grandmother no longer onscreen, is an elegiac remembrance of the spaces this woman once occupied, invisibly chronicling her passing of one life into the next as her possessions—dishes, photographs, jewelry—remain in place for a few remaining moments. The sun sets, the home is enveloped in despairing darkness, the film ends.

“Dalsza Modlitwa (Another Prayer)”, the third and final stanza, literally projects the first film into the vacant home, completing the loop in the trilogy’s ritualized, infinitesimal structure. Her memory—represented by the embalming capabilities of Bohdanowicz’s camera—is cast as a spectre over top of the objects used to remember her. It demonstrates the quasi-communion that exists between sense perceptions and malleable memories. But this gesture also completes a three-step how-to guide for Bohdanowicz’s image-making. The films accumulate their greatest emotional resonance at the very instant their intentions become unequivocally clear.

Never Eat Alone is a docu-fictional portrait of Joan Benac, the director’s maternal grandmother,  as she searches for a lost love from the set of a televised melodrama from the 1950s. Joan’s granddaughter Audrey (Deragh Campbell) reaches out to the man (played by the grandfather of Bohdanowicz’s partner), which establishes a schema the film never follows through on. Like in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), another elongated examination of a solitary woman’s banal routine, what is unsaid and unrealized is evocative precisely for the sense of absence. The film’s numerous artifacts of family history—a wardrobe passed down from grandmother to granddaughter that will likely never be worn again, or the found footage from that kitschy television program—will lose their punctum when Joan passes. The intransferible memories that once gave these objects meaning will vanquish forever.

Maison du bonheur thrusts the director deeper into her film’s memorial paradigm. She’s no longer the absent force behind the camera like in the Last Prayer Trilogy and no longer existing vicariously through her actress stand-in like in Never Eat Alone. Seen packing her bags in the opening shots, Sofia alludes to the purpose of her one month trip to France, transposed over images of a soft-toned Toronto skyline: “I want to create new memories. The last time I was in France I had a bit of a rough time.” We’re then immersed into the Gallic rituals of the neurotic and endearing Juliane, the mother of a colleague and a widowed astrologer Sofia had previously never met. Maison du bonheur rhapsodizes Juliane’s life stories through luminous 16mm photography of her luxurious lifestyle, matching her joie de vivre with equally euphoric sights and sounds of Parisian leisure.

We never learn what exactly happened on Sofia’s previous trip to France or what Juliane’s exuberance is self-consciously hiding. But these gaps in the film’s historical record, visually represented by the frequent burnouts to black, point towards anxieties that underlie Juliane and Sofia’s shared distance. Rather than shoot her subject as a talking head (partially because of the limited amount of film the director had for her Bolex camera), Bohdanowicz uses acousmatic sound to impose Juliane’s charming narration over top of images of her bourgeois bric-a-brac. But, crucially, Maison is not interrogating Juliane’s social status or consumerist accumulation; its aims are less materialist than metaphysical. The film shows how these objects have stood in for memories and how their superficial pleasantries have effaced the darker implications they were once connected to. Maison du bonheur becomes all the more fascinating as soon as you realize it’s not about what is shown and said but about what is not shown and what is not said.

Bohdanowicz approaches montage like an archivist. Her gaze is transfixed on what might otherwise be forgotten: upon the accumulated, permanent artefacts of contingent existences, the potentially meaningless spaces and utensils that are the only remaining mediator between what is and what was. In the most reductive of terms, her cinema could be pigeonholed as a feminist project: to memorialize the quotidian and often forgotten affairs of matriarchs in a culture ordered around male genealogies. Her films are naturally slow paced then, taking their time to pass traditions down from one generation to the next: not oral histories so much as image histories. Whether it’s through the image-memorials of her grandmothers in the Last Prayer Trilogy or Never Eat Alone, or the gaps in Juliane’s narrated accounts, what Bohdanowicz’s cinema continually understands is that any study of how we remember must also be a study of what we choose to forget.