A flower that opens for one night. Three women. The plants of Mexico, and the house that gave them a name.
The film
A grandmother teaches a girl to recognise flowers with her eyes closed. Years later, the girl walks back through the places her grandmother named. At dawn she gives the night flower to the water. Then she turns to us.
A film written and directed by Anton Richer, for the evening imagined by Ana Monforte.
Xinú is opening new boutiques. Ana Monforte imagined their opening nights: an evening guests remember with their nose. The film is the heart of that night.
Guests arrive in the dark and are asked to close their eyes. The first thing they meet is a scent.
The film is projected. Each time a plant appears on screen, its scent fills the room. A film you breathe.
A table in six courses, one for each perfume: agave, copal, tobacco, monstera, tuberose, vetiver.
Smell is the one sense we learn by hand. Someone holds a flower under your face and says its name. The grandmother is the first perfumer of the family.
The great houses of the world make perfume from Mexican plants. Xinú gave those plants a house of their own. The film goes to where each one grows and says its name in Spanish.
A flower that lives for a single night is the purest image of a scent. It is there, then it is gone, and only memory keeps it. That is lo inexpresable.
A grandmother, a mother, a daughter. A perfume is passed down the way a memory is. The film ends by handing it to you, and the evening hands it to the guests.
Every plant wears the bottle's own label: a white band rising from bottom to top, with its Latin name, its Mexican name and the perfume it becomes.
Memory is grey, like an old photograph. Only the perfume keeps its colour: the walnut of the cap, the amber of the liquid. Memory fades. Scent stays.
They could be anyone's grandmother, mother and daughter. Their gestures, their clothes and the garden they share tell us they are one family.
Black linen column, fringed cape. On the stone bench beside the night flower.
Charcoal coat, black turtleneck. Alone in the garden, years later.
White poplin dress. Standing by the black water, eyes closed.
Tuberose along the black pool. Monstera under the old tree. Agave against the wall. The night cactus falling down the back wall, its buds hanging like small lamps. A bench cut from a single block of stone.
The film opens here at dusk and closes here at dawn.
The idea, the evening, the house as we read it, the first images, the three women, the night flower, the garden, the six places and the one colour. Twenty pages.
