In a castle in Austria, a silent study of a mother’s face leads a man to dwell on his ghostly inheritances. In an analyst’s office, a voice that would speak of a father’s transgressions gets stuck in the back of the throat. In the darkness of a pre-dawn city, a stranger’s approach provokes a sensation of a dissolving self; in the aether of digital space a split-screen interaction triggers a spiral of forbidden desires.

Across a series of surreal scenarios, Mother Tongue pinpoints the instants at which words fail, lives fracture, and bodies break apart into incorporeal energies. In the literary lineage of Kafka and Celan, it answers an urge to speak the unspeakable through elisions, repetitions, and recursions, through language that lapses, lags, and loops back on itself. At once mesmeric and abrasive, abstracted and fiercely embodied, its stories move across a breadth of subjects—from family dynamics to panic attacks, from psychoanalysis to the Holocaust—but are anchored, always, in the visceral experience of everyday sins, in the breath and pulse that accompany an attempt to articulate the forbidden.