This September’s 49th iteration of the Toronto International Film Festival marked my seventh year in attendance and my third year as press. As my TIFF spectatorship is still in its infancy, I was delighted to participate in the FIPRESCI jury, which aims to spotlight emerging filmmakers and their debut features with a World Premiere in TIFF’s Discovery program. I often gravitate toward Discovery picks as they feel decidedly fresh and less burnished by established practices than films in other categories. They are generally diverse in scope and culture; this year’s slate alone represented more than 25 countries.
Several salient themes appeared in this batch of Discovery picks: a kind of totalizing isolation (On Falling; U Are the Universe), schemes to dismantle family units (Bonjour Tristesse; The Paradise of Thorns; Linda), and efforts to reinvigorate memory in our favor (Shook; Do I Know You From Somewhere?). However, most films I watched involved narratives featuring fraught or unorthodox motherhood—single maternal figures who defied audience expectations in their resilience against relentless hardship or their contorted devotion to their children.
The FIPRESCI prize-winning film Mother Mother(2024, Somalia, K’naan Warsame) exemplified this trait in its depiction of a Somalian mother grieving the death of her teenage son by inviting his assailant to live with her as retribution. It’s a somewhat inconceivable act both within and beyond the confines of the film, disrupting our projections of how a mother “ought” to feel through her grief. Beyond this, however, numerous titles similarly fit the bill: Aberdeen (Ryan Cooper, Eva Thomas, Canada, 2024), Boong (Lakshmipriya Devi, India, 2024), The Courageous (Jasmin Gordon, Switzerland, 2024), Linda (Mariana Wainstein, Argentina/Spain, 2024), Saba (Maksud Hossain, Bangladesh, 2024), and Village Keeper (Karen Chapman, Canada, 2024).
The Courageous and Village Keeper observed deeply devoted, down-on-their-luck single mothers fettered by bureaucracy while trying to improve their children’s lives. For Jule (Ophélia Kolb) in The Courageous, this manifests as efforts to navigate Valais’s social welfare system while promising her three children (between the ages of six and ten) a beautiful house. Jule disappears frequently—seemingly for illicit reasons—and her children find their way home, accustomed to their mother’s precarity. But even bleary-eyed or aggrieved, Jule tries to create tiny spectacles for her children to keep them content and oblivious to their hardships.
Village Keeper sees Beverly-Jean (Oluniké Adeliyi), an overprotective woman with two teenage children and a mother in a small apartment in Lawrence Heights. She experiences pervasive waves of trauma and grief brought about by flashbacks and, to shield her children from similar circumstances takes it upon herself to control their movements despite their desire for independence. Saving every penny for a down payment, Beverly-Jean begins to collapse under the pressure of leading a household that is beginning to resent her authority.
Aberdeen and Saba present prototypically “difficult” mothers who are less committed to their older daughters to varying degrees. In Saba, the titular character (Mehazabien Chowdhury) must care for her paraplegic mother after a heart attack. Scrambling to find work and sell their home to pay for the requisite surgery, Saba also faces bitterness from her mother, who is rightfully frustrated with her circumstances but expends her anger on her child in frightening ways.
Comparably, Aberdeen (Gail Maurice) is a mercurial woman unable to find stability after losing her ID while fleeing the police. When her brother becomes ill and can no longer care for his dependents, Aberdeen is determined to lift her grandchildren from the foster system and reconnect with her estranged daughter. The mission is virtuous but fraught with administrative hurdles that repeatedly reveal Aberdeen’s rigidity and hurt; this is communicated alongside memories of growing up in the Peguis First Nation community and the slow-growing institutional failures that impelled her downfall.
The recurring presence of struggling single mothers in the program is not a complaint nor a narrative slight. Still, it reflects a sort of global anxiety about the subjugated position and barriers to access faced by women. The resulting stories suggest a rerouting of the family unit and a deeper consideration of how motherhood is a mutable experience. This theme has long found its way into cinema, but if the emerging class of independent filmmakers worldwide are casting their gaze on maternity with equal parts curiosity, condemnation, and vigilance, we might all be liable to heed their call.
Saffron Maeve
Edited by Anne-Christine Loranger
© FIPRESCI 2024