Surviving My Mother

Survival is the name of the game in this drama from director Emile Gaudreault, focusing on three generations of women from the same family: grandmother, mother, and daughter. While entitled, SURVIVING MY MOTHER, the film is as much about surviving your mother as surviving your daughter, as each generation of women not only struggle with the legacy of emotional neglect that begot them–their mothers–but also with the very same legacy that they will pass on to their daughters. SURVIVING MY MOTHER is centered around Clara, a daughter who for years relentlessly takes care of her terminally ill, and subsequently, pessimistic and embittered mother. Clara's sense of duty as caretaker is so great that she not only loses sight of what it truly means to be a daughter, but she also neglects her duty as mother to her own daughter, Bianca. It is clear that all three women wish to escape the pervading illness and death as well as emotional sterility that seem to haunt the house in which they reside. As each woman finds her own haphazard means of escape and “survival,” a plot ripe with guilt, double lives, and secrecy unfolds until at last the women seems to find survival in each other. – D.M.