Multicultural Motherhood

Around the world for Mother's Day

Back in 2017, I wrote a piece called “Multicultural Motherhood” on the WordPress blog iteration of Marshall and the Movies. The piece has always lodged in my mind as the kind of criticism I love to write — finding the way disparate movies can speak to each other in fascinating ways. Here’s how that piece started:

“I watched Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void and Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George in short succession and was struck by some surprising parallels. Both are films that explore the complications of maternity outside of a dominant Western understanding but do so in wildly different – yet tellingly effective – ways.”

In honor of Mother’s Day in the USA, I’ll republish what I wrote about those films and expand the list to 10 films about mothers worldwide. My hope remains the same as expressed in that original piece: “Let us never forget the many paths that women can forge towards maternity. And, on the flip side, there are plenty of women who are not celebrating Mother’s Day but so desperately wish to be. Let us be understanding of their current standing not as a final destination, but rather just one point on their journey”

🇮🇱 Fill the Void, rental

Rama Burshtein’s film unfolds in an orthodox Jewish community following the tragic death of Esther during childbirth. In the wake of her passing, Esther’s younger sister Shira (Hadas Yaron) faces a difficult choice. At 18, she has her whole life ahead of her and looks forward to an arranged marriage to a man she quite fancies. But the hole in the community demands her action, and Shira’s family comes to her with an unconventional plan: marry her former brother-in-law Yochay and raise her nephew Mordechai as she would a son.

The film’s tightly contained action and deliberation have the dimensions of a stage drama, yet Burshtein films it as anything but. She trains her director of photography Asaf Sudry to direct the lens towards Shira’s face, framing it tightly and making her internal tussle play out in prolonged close-ups. With this technique, Burshtein achieves that strange paradox of cinema: the film becomes more universal as it delves into the specifics of its insular community.

🇳🇬/🇺🇸 Mother of George, free with ads on Tubi TV

Mother of George takes place on the opposite side of the world, in a Nigerian community nestled in Brooklyn. A newly married couple, Ayodele and Adenike Balogen (Issach de Bankolé and Danai Gurira), begins working towards building a family since expecting is the expectation for them. But their pregnancy journey hits a rocky patch primarily due to male-factor infertility from Ayodele. His patriarchal attitudes make him stubborn and reluctant to receive any kind of help since, in his mind, any impediment to conception comes from the female end.

Unlike the searing intimacy of Fill the Void, Andrew Dosunmu’s film takes a much wider look at his character’s struggles. Cinematographer Bradford Young (who has since shot Selma and received an Oscar nomination for Arrival) uses long shots to reflect just how small Adenike feels in her time of anguish. Stricken by the seemingly arbitrary force of infertility, she’s left with few options – and one involves Ayodele’s brother.

🇩🇪 The Audition, free with ads on Tubi TV

Nina Hoss (perhaps most familiar to Anglophone viewers for her turn in TÁR opposite Cate Blanchett) brings the heat as a mother with a great deal of displaced energy in The Audition. She’s German sternness personified in her role as a violin teacher in the model of Fletcher from Whiplash. Never one to issue easy praise, Hoss’ Anna has little to give her more athletically-minded son and disappointing husband. It’s not entirely clear what she sees in the student Alexander, but she pours all her maternal and musical energy into getting this pupil ready for a big audition. “It's not negative – fighting is a good thing," director Ina Weisse told me ahead of the film’s premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. "To be a good mother, you have to fight with yourself." This misalignment pushes everyone in Anna’s orbit to their breaking point, and it’s tense and thrilling to await the inevitable collapse.

🇸🇳 Felicité, free with ads through Fandango at Home (and available to rent from various digital platforms)

Motherhood gets ferocious and borderline feral in Felicité, a Senegalese drama about a lounge singer pushed to her limits by an automotive accident involving her son. She must race against the clock to raise the funds necessary to prevent doctors from amputating his leg, which sends her on a wild goose chase around Dakar to scrap in the most pugnacious sense of the word for every penny she can find. Director Alain Gomis visualizes her struggle through striking close-ups the frame her like a Pietá wailing over her child. True to her musical background, Felicité feels practically symphonic in structure as it breaks up movements with her performances. Each one expresses vividly in song what she cannot through funds or words.

🇵🇭 Insiang, Criterion Channel

I saw Insiang on somewhat of a whim shortly after I moved to New York, and it’s one of the viewing experiences that solidified for me why I wanted to live in such a place of cinematic discovery. This 1976 Filipino drama (which was saved by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation) played as part of a program focusing on melodramas at the then-Film Society of Lincoln Center, but resist your temptation to think of the genre in a negative light. The titular character of Insiang is actually the daughter, who finds herself assaulted by her mother Tonya’s new lover. Given that he’s just moved in with them (displacing a biological family member), this introduces a dynamic of combustible instability in the household with Tonya placed in the position to determine who she ultimately believes and favors. While this might seem like a standard morality play or a victim narrative, director Lino Brocka pulls a fascinating narrative bait-and-switch as he makes the audience mull over who the real protagonist of the story really is.

🇨🇦 I Killed My Mother, Hoopla and Kanopy (available through select public libraries)

I once made the mistake of asking Xavier Dolan (in the context of the Telluride Film Festival’s student symposium) of whether he thought he’d exhausted the topic of mothers and sons. The answer I got was a resounding “no,” not to mention a look of utter bewilderment. Despite what the title of his directorial debut I Killed My Mother might have you think, there is no murder in the film. That’s not to say, however, that Dolan’s angsty 16-year-old character Hubert doesn’t contemplate offing his mother a great deal. She pushes his buttons just as he pushes hers, resulting in plenty of bickering and nasty quarrels. It’s not just a rant against overbearing mothers of queer sons, though. Dolan’s film contemplates the root of mother-son tensions, the subject of stories for millennia. This feels like a courtroom drama at times as we weigh who is culpable for the drama playing out on-screen. The answer isn’t ever entirely clear as we’re presented with a dilemma resembling the chicken-and-egg question: whose terrorizing nature came first?

🇪🇸 Parallel Mothers, available to rent through select digital providers

Women, especially mothers, are the foundational element of the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema. I had the great honor to speak with him for the most recent feature he directed, 2021’s Parallel Mothers, which in many ways felt like a thesis statement for his body of work at large. Rather than try to say it better, I’m just going to turn this description over to the Oscar-winning filmmaker himself:

“I grew up surrounded by women: my mother and all our neighbors. Even when my mother couldn’t be with us and needed us to be taken care of, she would take us to the neighbors. All throughout the ’50s and ’60s, I grew up surrounded by women. I think of all the female characters I’ve written and being inspired by these women and their stability to overcome anything. By their ability to fight and by their strength.

However, I think the big difference in Parallel Mothers is that these are contemporary mothers. These mothers are not mothers that have resonances, say, to my own mother. One mother is a very conservative mother. Then you have Ana, who’s a very young woman with a new maternity linked up to the tragic story of her rape. And then you’ve got Pénelope’s character, a contemporary mother and a single mother who has to really struggle to balance her role as a mother and as someone who has to sustain a family. I do really like this idea that you bring up the fact that the women are sustaining the country. I think particularly the character of Janis, in her sense, does represent this. Her personal, intimate problem resonates with a collective problem.”

🇧🇦 Quo Vadis, Aida?, free with ads on Tubi TV

Every mother faces some crucible stemming from the competing logic of protecting her family and doing what’s right for the broader global family. But few face this conundrum quite so acutely as Jasna Đuričić’s titular character, a Bosnian translator for the U.N. trying to leverage her clout to save her loved ones — even as the entirety of her small town teeters on the verge of collapse as the Serbian army encroaches. Jasmila Žbanić’s drama is a brutal, unsparing watch about the power and limits of maternal love in the face of violence and villainy.

🇰🇷 Secret Sunshine, Criterion Channel and MUBI

I reluctantly revisited Secret Sunshine, a film that had done jarringly little for me on first watch, earlier this year as part of doing research for an interview with South Korean director Lee Chang-dong that unfortunately didn’t happen. I don’t know what changed in five years, but I was bowled over this time around. If motherhood is a continuation of life in the future, Secret Sunshine provides a sympathetic look at what happens when a mother gets weighed down by her past. Jeon Do-yeon stuns as Lee Shin-ae, a widow who moves back to her late husband’s hometown with their young child in tow. Integration proves tough before tragedy strikes once again, sending her reeling and seeking answers in religion. Director Lee provides an overwhelming sincerity to his exploration of the promise and peril of spirituality as a solution for her grief.

🇦🇷 The Sleepwalkers, Amazon Prime Video

I waffled on whether to include this Argentinian mother-daughter drama so soon after featuring it in a 2022 newsletter about some of my favorite global cinema I’d seen at film festivals…

March Around the World

…but enough subscribers are new since then, and I think about The Sleepwalkers a surprisingly great amount. Erica Rivas is electric as a strung-out mother struggling to grasp how little control she still exerts over her teenage daughter. Director Paula Hernández thrillingly visualizes this discomfort, making us feel as sick as Rivas’ Luisa at any given moment. When all her worst fears come true, we get a moment of intergenerational understanding at last — and it’s a sobering reminder that parents and children can share tragedies as well as joys.

Paying Marshall and the Movies subscribers got to read me counting down my 10 favorite moviegoing experiences (and see my entire movie ticket collection!)

My Top Moviegoing Experiences

For Slant Magazine, I interviewed Academy Award-winning filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi (my second time!) with his newest film Evil Does Not Exist now playing in theaters.

If you aren’t familiar with Hamaguchi and want to learn more, never fear! I just unlocked a previously subscriber-only newsletter on his work linked here:

House of Hamaguchi

You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.

Subscribers get these posts in real-time and what I’ve been watching, listening to, and reading this past week! Ahead: my favorite Ryan Gosling press tour bit, the earworm on repeat from Dua Lipa’s latest album, and my answer to the question movie fans have been asking this summer.