Perfected Grammar

Screenings of the film as part of the online edition of the 22nd FF Millennium Docs Against Gravity, which will take place from May 20 to June 2, 2025.

Through language lessons with her mother, a daughter learns more about her Indonesian roots, her mother’s painful journey, and her longing for a place to call home. In Budapest, an elderly mother teaches her Hungarian-speaking daughter the difference between active and passive tenses in the mother's Indonesian mother tongue.

What starts as a simple film about a familial language lesson encompasses the mother’s painful past, her journey to Hungary, her unintended life there, the effects of history on the individual, and the power of language to both reveal and connect.