MOTHERING IN THE MOVEMENT

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MOTHERING IN THE MOVEMENT

By Laurie TOWNSHEND

Art - Culture - Pre-Production 2021

Mothering in the Movement follows Staceyann Chin, Brooklyn’s most outspoken poet-activist and reluctant poster-mom for radical Black parenting as she raises her daughter Zuri, while investigating the past of her own mother who abandoned her as an infant.

- Year of production
- 2021
- Genres
- Art - Culture, Documentary
- Countries
- CANADA
- Languages
- ENGLISH-CANADA
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Laurie TOWNSHEND
- Writer(s)
- Laurie TOWNSHEND , Alison DUKE
- Producer(s)
- Alison DUKE (OYA MEDIA GROUP), Ngardy CONTEH GEORGE (OYA MEDIA GROUP), Lea MARIN (NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA / OFFICE NATIONAL DU FILM DU CANADA)
- Synopsis
- Mothering in the Movement is part mother-daughter buddy film, part investigative saga that follows popular Jamaican-American poet and civil rights activist Staceyann Chin, as she navigates being a mom while discovering the truth about her own mother who abandoned her as a child.
  
  Staceyann unpacks her newly purchased first home in Brooklyn and finds a box of letters that were surreptitiously slipped to her after a show by a woman who found them discarded in the basement of a house in Montreal. The address: 103 Brunet Road is for the house her mother shared with her then husband after immigrating from Jamaica in the early 1970's. Staceyann traces the address scrawled across the envelope, recalling her childhood determination to learn French and eventually live in that house with her mother.
  
  Staceyann’s first glimpse of 103 Brunet Rd. comes during a trip to Montreal in the spring of 2019. With Zuri in tow, she ascends the steps to the quaint two-storey home and rings the doorbell. What unfolds is a riveting series of interviews with the home’s current occupants, followed by impromptu visits with her mother’s old neighbours where she learns of Hazel’s love of lavish garden parties and expensive cars. Staceyann struggles to reconcile new revelations, undated photographs and home videos with the stories she clung to as a child.
  
  While processing all that she’s learned about her mother, Staceyann tries to negotiate a balance between the pain she still carries as Hazel’s wounded child and the joy she has for being Zuri’s mother. Excerpts from their popular mother-daughter Youtube series punctuate intimate vérité snapshots of Staceyann’s empowered approach to motherhood. The turmoil of Staceyann's life without a mother contrasts with the joy she takes in being a mom to Zuri. Both the trauma and the triumphs of mothering are in conversation as Staceyann continues to be shaped by both.
  
  Hazel now lives in a home for the mentally ill in Germany. As the pieces of her story come together and fall apart, Staceyann weighs the risks of confronting her ailing mother with what she’s learned. With Zuri always at her side, the pair travels to Hazel’s nursing home, where three generations converge for the first time in nearly a decade. The final vignette speaks poignantly to the complexities of motherhood - Staceyann flanked by the daughter she’s still learning to mother and the mother she’s perhaps still learning to forgive.