WATCH TRAILER

Mothertime

A film by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan

US | 2018 | 60 minutes | Color | DVD | English | Order No. 191251 |

MOTHERTIME is a personal video diary that takes us on a corporeal journey in parenting via a small portable Go-Pro camera mounted on the filmmaker and her toddler over the period of a year and a half.

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SYNOPSIS

MOTHERTIME is a personal video diary that takes us on a corporeal journey in parenting via a small portable Go-Pro camera. Worn by both mother and child, or left on any surface and turned on and off remotely, the camera over the period of a year and a half captures a real-time, sensorial journey spanning the frenetic to mundane.
 
Set primarily amidst scenes at home, the film explores the whimsical, ordinary, sometimes claustrophobic repeating loops of work and play in daily domestic life. The audience is drawn into the raw and messy reality of the mother-daughter relationship as the markers of toddlerhood become the turning points of the film itself. Early mobility, language acquisition and increasing child independence provide an intimate perspective of the mother–child relationship, intentionally blurring where the mother ends and the child begins.

Like the fictional film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, MOTHERTIME explores the boundaries of time and home to invite the viewer to see the labor of motherhood as neither romanticized nor banal, while it plays in the physical and emotional space between mother and child. 

PRESS

"Guevara-Flanagan invents a rare, brilliant, and complex filmmaking language all her own (and of her child)."

Alexandra Juhasz Chair of the Film Department, Brooklyn College, CUNY; Author, "Blackwell Companion to Film Studies: Documentary"

"A rare, unsentimental presentation of the sensory experience of early motherhood by a single mom, with unflinching meditations on monotonous routines, claustrophobia, struggle, and love in richly contingent, well-paced, and surprising scenes."

Dr. Andy Rice Assistant Professor of Film Studies and Comparative Media Studies, Department of Media, Journalism and Film, Miami University in Ohio

"Inventively repurposing the extreme sports GoPro Camera–widely associated with heroism, spectacle, masculinity, and speed–Guevara-Flanagan turns this technology on its head to ask critical questions about whose labor is valued and visible as she uses the GoPro to create an intimate, immersive, and durational portrait of time spent caring for her own young daughter–a kind of domestic "extreme sport" that unfolds over hours, days, and years."

Irene Lusztig Professor, Film & Digital Media, Director, Center for Documentary Arts & Research (CDAR), University of California, Santa Cruz

“Because so few films focus on its theme, Mothertime is an important contribution to feminist documentary filmmaking and the burgeoning field of motherhood studies.”

Mary Celeste Kearney Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre, Director, Gender Studies Program, University of Notre Dame

"Subject and medium work together here seamlessly, creating an abbreviated Jeanne Dielman, a 21st century portrait of the minutiae of motherhood that no thoughtless Hollywood comedy could approximate."

Screen Slate

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • Mothering Every Day Microcinema Tour

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s first feature-length film was an acclaimed documentary covering four years in the lives of four adolescent girls. GOING ON 13 was an official selection of Tribeca, Silverdocs, and many other film festivals worldwide. It received funding from ITVS and was broadcast on public television in 2009. Kristy has also produced and directed several short films, including EL CORRIDO DE CECILIA RIOS, winner of the Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Short Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival, a chronicle of the violent death of 15-year-old Cecilia Rios. It was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and subsequently broadcast on the Sundance Channel. Her most recent feature, WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUPERHEROINES, traces the evolution and legacy of the comic book hero Wonder Woman as a way to reflect on society’s anxieties about women’s liberation. The film garnered numerous awards, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2012 and was broadcast on PBS's Independent Lens series in 2013. Now an assistant professor at UCLA, Kristy holds a MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University. WHAT HAPPENED TO HER continues her exploration on the themes of gender and representation. (5/17)

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