Echo of You

Zara Zerny / Denmark / 2023 / 76 min

We often hear about elderly couples who pass away shortly after each other. However, this is not the case for the lovable cast of characters in Zara Zerny’s touching debut film. All of the men and women between the ages of 80 and 100 have lost their life partner and are now left alone with the echoes of love in empty houses where the clothes in the wardrobe still smell of the deceased. It could easily become sentimental, but with a carefully calibrated sense of the nuanced emotions played out by the characters, ‘Echoes of Love’ is not only about grief, but also humour, bitterness, the will to live on and a generation that is slowly disappearing. The candid conversations unfold in stoic images, tightly composed like classical paintings, and in stylised sequences in the homes of the old people themselves, where the past is evoked in a poetic and honest way. A film for all generations, and a film that younger generations can learn a lot of life lessons from.