Thérèse, in the photographs, seems to be somewhere else, with an absent gaze. She seems to be holding her breath, protecting a secret or suppressing a cry. Thérèse Lefebvre, née Larin, disappeared over half a century ago and has never been heard from again. Alexandra Boilard-Lefebvre, her granddaughter, wants to bring back to life this woman she never knew. She investigates, retraces, records and transcribes, to fill in the gaps in the story. She writes about the joys and tragedies of this young woman who, like so many other housewives in the post-war decades, saw her aspirations swallowed up in the comfort of uniform suburbs.
Une histoire silencieuse is the culmination of a painstaking work of memory, closely following the ghostly stirrings of the past, and Thérèse’s silhouette gradually appears among the words and memories, in the scansion of voices and the whiteness of images.
