The Right to Forget

A filmmaker traces her Swiss grandfather's ties to mining in former Zaire, only to find that the family archives have been deliberately destroyed.

When Lisa Mazenauer asks her father about her grandfather Hans Mazenauer's gold mines, the answer is blunt: all the documents were burned, nothing remains, it must be forgotten. Connected to Mobutu Sese Seko and the mining business in 1980s Zaire, her grandfather's story sits at the intersection of personal secrecy and Switzerland's wider entanglement with colonial extractivism. As she attempts to retrace his dealings, the void in the family record begins to echo something much larger. Blending observational moments, constructed sequences and evocative archival material, The Right to Forget is a quietly gripping film that asks what happens when forgetting isn't passive, but deliberate.