A Mother Apart
Directed by Laurie Townshend
How do you raise a child when your own mother abandoned you? In a remarkable story of healing and forgiveness, Jamaican-American poet and LGBTQ+ activist Staceyann Chin radically re-imagines the essential art of mothering.
Canada | 2024 | 90 minutes | English, German
SYNOPSIS
A MOTHER APART follows acclaimed poet, performer, and activist Staceyann Chin (Def Poetry Slam, MotherStruck!) on a deeply personal search for her biological mother, who abandoned her as a child in Jamaica. Now a mother herself, Staceyann wrestles with the question: how do you raise a daughter when your own mother left you behind? Spanning Brooklyn, Montreal, Cologne, and Jamaica, her journey blends raw honesty, archival imagery, and vivid animation to trace decades of longing, pain, and resilience. As she seeks connection with the mother who didn’t raise her, Staceyann grapples with the legacy of abandonment and the radical possibility of forgiveness. Alongside her daughter Zuri, she reimagines what family, home, and healing can look like.
At once intimate and universal, A MOTHER APART is a profound story of resilience, reconciliation, and the courage to break cycles of neglect, as well as how to approach forgiveness and intergenerational healing with radical honesty and deep compassion. A vital work for conversations on LGBTQ+ identity, Black motherhood, and the transformative power of love and forgiveness, the film invites audiences to reflect on what it truly means to mother and to be mothered.
PRESS
A remarkably matrilineal piece, speaking about pain and forgiveness, about being victimized without becoming a victim.
A Mother Apart is about a kind of forgiveness, albeit a messy, sad one. But even more, it’s about finding a voice.
This extraordinary portrait of a woman haunted and scarred by abandonment turns into a tale of real strength and joy.
A courageous exploration of abandonment, identity, and the enduring pull of family.
Laurie Townshend has brilliantly constructed an exploration of Chin's intentional parenting.
Chin retraces her mother’s steps in documentary A Mother Apart to better understand who her mother was while reflecting on what kind of a mother she wants to be to her own child in this deeply personal journey of motherhood.
SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS
- Nominee, Allan King Award for Excellence in Documentary, 2025 DGC Awards
- Best Feature Documentary, 2024 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival
- Best Canadian Feature, 2024 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival
- Audience Award for Best Documentary, 2024 Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival
- Hot Docs International Film Festival
- Doc NYC
- Frameline Film Festival
- Blackstar Film Festival
- Cleveland International Film Festival
- Inside Out Film Festival
- Toronto Pan African Film Festival
- Vancouver Queer Film Festival
- Reel Q Pittsburgh LGBTQ+ Film Festival
- March on Washington Film Festival
- St. John\'s International Women\'s Film Festival
- IMAGE+NATION LGBTQ Film Festival
- Cinema on the Bayou
- BFI Flare (European Premiere)
- Women+Film Festival
- Womxn of Color Weekend
- Queer Voices: NYC Film Festival
- 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Laurie Townshend
Laurie Townshend is a Toronto-based filmmaker, writer and educator. Raised by a Jamaican mother—the family’s eloquent griot—Laurie learned early on that before we shape stories, stories shape us. Her films centre on the human capacity to transform small acts of courage into quiet revolutions, as seen in the dramatic short The Railpath Hero (2013, TIFF Black Star Festival, starring Stephan James), the unscripted series Human Frequency Streetdocs (2014) and the award-winning short doc Charley (2016). A Mother Apart is Laurie’s first feature-length film. (10/7)
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PROFILED
Profiled knits the stories of mothers of Black and Latino youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Some of the victims—Eric Garner, Michael Brown—are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods.
Ranging from the routine harassment of minority students in an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood to the killings and protests in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, PROFILED bears witness to the racist violence that remains an everyday reality for Black and Latino people in this country. Moving interviews with victims’ family members are juxtaposed with sharply etched analyses by evolutionary biologist, Joseph L.Graves, Jr, (The Race Myth) and civil rights lawyer, Chauniqua D. Young, (Center for Constitutional Rights, Stop and Frisk lawsuit). PROFILED gives us a window on one of the burning issues of our time.
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Ovarian Psycos
Riding at night through streets deemed dangerous in Eastside Los Angeles, the Ovarian Psycos use their bicycles to confront the violence in their lives. At the helm of the crew is founder Xela de la X, a single mother and poet M.C. dedicated to recruiting an unapologetic, misfit crew of women of color. The film intimately chronicles Xela as she struggles to strike a balance between her activism and nine year old daughter Yoli; street artist Andi who is estranged from her family and journeys to become a leader within the crew; and bright eyed recruit Evie, who despite poverty, and the concerns of her protective Salvadoran mother, discovers a newfound confidence.
The film Ovarian Psycos rides along with the Ova’s, exploring the impact of the group’s activism, born of feminist ideals, Indigenous understanding and an urban/hood mentality, on neighborhood women and communities as they confront injustice, racism, and violence, and take back their streets one ride at a time.
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Four Wives – One Man
From Nahid Persson, the filmmaker of the award-winning Prostitution Behind the Veil, comes an intimate portrait of a polygamist family in a rural Iranian village. Persson reveals the intricacies of the relationships between the four wives, their husband, their astoundingly free-spoken mother-in-law and their numerous children. Sometimes humorous and often heartbreaking, this film follows the daily lives of the wives whose situation has turned them into both bitter rivals and co-conspirators against their abusive husband.
Persson’s camera unobtrusively and beautifully captures the range of the family’s interactions – from peaceful, pastoral scenes of a family picnic, to the temporary chaos caused by a broken faucet in the kitchen, to a furtive, whispered conversation between two wives about the latest beating. The women’s work – making bread, weaving carpets, milking and herding the sheep – provide the background to their frank conversations. Avoiding sensationalism and sentimentality, this film provides unique insights into the practice of polygamy and its effect on the women involved.
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