The powers of motherhood: a daughter mourns, a grandmother protects herself with history, and a mum teaches her girl how to survive
Our occasional Sunday video session - aimed at connecting inner and outer life for better action in the world, but not in the obvious ways…
We shook the networks this week and very easily came upon three short videos about the power of motherhood.
The first (embedded above) was sourced from the wonderful Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings’ blog. Maria profiles not just the young video maker Jenny Wright (whose Mum died halfway through her St. Martin’s art course, and to whom this video is a tribute), but also the work of DW Winnicott, the child psychologist, whose essay “The Mother’s Contribution to Society” she extracts:
Is not this contribution of the devoted mother unrecognized precisely because it is immense? If this contribution is accepted, it follows that every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.
…If our society delays making full acknowledgement of this dependence, which is a historical fact in the initial stage of development of every individual, there must remain a block both to progress and to regression, a block that is based on fear.
If there is no true recognition of the mother’s part, then there must remain a vague fear of dependence. This fear will sometimes take the form of a fear of WOMAN, or fear of a woman, and at other times will take less easily recognized forms, always including the fear of domination.
The second embed is from Aeon’s video curation, text below:
‘I am sorry I don’t understand. Can you explain?’
In anticipation of making a short film about her grandmother, the German animator Dal Park conducted extensive research before travelling to South Korea for an interview. This included reading and rereading a book that her grandmother, a retired literature professor, had written about her life.
But when Park arrived, she found her grandmother intermittently confused and agitated by the project, repeatedly shifting the conversation to historical events and redirecting Park to her book when asked personal questions.
Through distinctive hand-drawn animations and audio recorded during her trip, Park’s short West Question East Answer manifests the many frustrations of the visit and her attempts to connect with her grandmother. While reflecting a deeply personal experience, the short is also likely to resonate with anyone who has struggled to bridge a cultural or generational divide with a family member.
From the New York Times’ Op-Doc strand, Dulce tells a powerful story about motherhood and the urgencies of work and survival. An extract from the film-makers article here:
Dulce is Spanish for “sweet,” and sweetness is what the 8-year-old protagonist of this film, aptly named Dulce, radiated as she welcomed us to her village, La Ensenada, on Colombia’s Pacific coast.
We were there to document the effects of climate change on women in traditional communities, where rising sea levels have made difficult lives even harder. And we decided to center this story on the piangua, a black clam that women in these Afro-Caribbean communities harvest by hand to support their families (the clams are considered a delicacy in nearby Ecuador).
It turned out that Dulce’s mother, Betty Arboleda, was a pianguera. Had she taken her daughter out to join her at work among the mangroves? No, Betty told us — because Dulce could not swim. Luckily for us, this was about to change.
A boy had pushed Dulce off a dock a few days before, giving her and her mother a serious scare. Betty was determined: Dulce must learn to swim. So over three days we filmed her doing that, with all the intimate conversations, natural sights and sounds, and Dulce’s unmistakable emotions forming the arc of the story.
Where this story goes from here is uncertain. Rising seas caused by climate change have already washed away several villages upriver from Dulce’s home. We met residents there who had rebuilt their homes two or three times in recent years. They now live in such fear of the tides that they sometimes sleep in their boats.