Picture this a woman has a kidney stone removed, and for the sake of curiosity requests a chemical analysis of the nearly perfectly round object. She finds out that it contains traces of a mineral that only exists in Antarctica, leaving her with more questions: how did it get there? How long had it been traveling? Now retired from being a wildlife documentary narrator who thought she had told all her stories, she sets out on a worldwide expedition to solve her kidney stone mystery and learn about rocks, minerals, and the earth itself through people’s personal narratives. This is Sofie Benoot’s Apple Cider Vinegar. There were two encounters that stuck with me.
The first was with a woman who suffers from chronic pain; she says that she can feel earthquakes because they move over her body. So during her days managing pain and monitoring tectonic plates’ movements, she takes care of her husband (who watches the same movies over and over because he has short-term memory loss). Not too far off from our narrator (Siân Phillips), who used to make nature movies but now spends days watching camera feed from biological research institutes while reminiscing about herself. Maybe this isn’t really a movie about a woman and her kidney stone after all maybe it’s just about telling stories in order to control some semblance of order around us.
The second introduces us to a Palestinian quarry worker whose hands have become too damaged for him to continue working. I think here of Aeschylus and his The Oresteia; there’s one little bit that might help explain what Apple Cider Vinegar is asking. “This was always going to happen,” wrote the ancient Greek tragedian, “She’s been dead since the beginning.” So why tell it? Why does he care about his quarry’s history or its stones? I don’t believe that there is an answer to this question, nor does Benoot’s movie offer one.
But since knowing the outcome does not relieve us of history’s weight, perhaps this is why a woman and her kidney stone movie became so much about documenting and filming itself: if it took several minerals for it to take form, she is the result of every story she lived, every documentary she worked on, every place she lived in, and all those people she met. In the end, we can’t know how that mineral got inside of her but we can tell how persons are only ever the settling of various narrative layers much like a stone made up of different minerals. Perhaps telling these stories lightens them. To sum it up, Benoot’s movie may begin with the story of the kidney stone but for that rare mineral it is already an end as transformed into such, yet still, a tale demanding being told.
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