By John Corrado, The Joy of Movies
The 2024 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival runs from May 24th to June 1st at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.
The documentary A Mother Apart (which was one of the finalists for the Hot Docs Audience Award) offers a candid portrait of Staceyann Chin, a Jamaican-American poet whose experience of being abandoned by her mother as a young girl has informed her slam poetry and one-woman shows. When Staceyann’s mother Hazel moved to Montreal in the 1970s, she left her daughter behind in Jamaica, leaving her with complex trauma and a series of unanswered questions that have hung over her life.
Canadian filmmaker Laurie Townshend follows Staceyann, who eventually moved to Brooklyn as a young adult to live openly as a lesbian, as she raises her own daughter Zuri. She is determined not to repeat the same parenting mistakes, while also acknowledging the pain of not having her own mother around as a role model.
The documentary follows Staceyann as she reconnects with her younger sister Larah, and tries to track down her mother during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Hazel having seemingly disappeared. Some of the most interesting moments are when Staceyann meets with former neighbours and friends of Hazel’s, and has come to terms with how others saw her mother as a lovely and charming woman, not getting the full picture of how she treated her family.
If A Mother Apart occasionally feels too much like a home movie with its scenes of Staceyann and Zuri isolating at home (and features some uncanny valley animations), it’s an interesting and poignant look at the complexities of motherhood. Townshend’s film is most valuable as a portrait of navigating a thorny mother-daughter relationship, and healing from the trauma of parental abandonment.
