“Message To Mother” is a film about close relations with parents within the 21st century – specifically mother-daughter relationships. The reason I chose this specific subject is that I believe there’s a lack of recognition of all types of different relationships between two family members. Bad relationships between child and parent should be recognized just as much as good relationships between them and allowing society to see this change will enable society to become more accepting, undoing the stigma that all relationships between mothers and daughters are ‘ideal’. Making a film that highlights the issue of bad mother-daughter relationships can educate the audience and introduce normality into strained but ultimately loving relationships. In a wider sense of this film, it is based around the matriarchal aspect of these daughters lives and includes their point of view towards it, as this term references the mother being the leader of the family. The goal is to find the opinions of an offspring in a matriarchal household to explore how this affects the home life, and how they react to the matriarch positively or negatively. I aim to find out the realism of a mother-daughter relationship in 21st-century modern parenting, delving deep into the abyss of strong emotions felt by daughters to explore the pressures of perhaps being a ‘perfect’ daughter. I would like to also like to explore the 20th-century mother-daughter relationship to understand how different it was in those times and what was expected of daughters to be like. What influence were the mothers on their daughters in the 20th century and how do they differ from the 21st century? Are mother’s harder on their children now than in the 20th century and why? Are mother’s more fearful for their daughter’s now, and is the reason they are overprotective?
I hope for the individuals to write speeches about what they want to tell their mums, and read them to the camera. I will be given guidelines to the participants in what to talk about, preferably bringing up situations like what their mothers are critical of them about, or maybe what their mothers do to go out of their way to show excessive love towards them. This speech is to give the audience a realistic feel about their relationship with their mothers, and we hope to demonstrate the different closeness they feel towards their mums and to give positive and negative views on their mothers and the matriarchal aspect that they witness.
This film is not to demonize mothers, but to maybe give insight into home struggles, and maybe seek empathy for the role of mothers. “Message To Mother” intent is to reach out to female young adults, as every woman has a mother but in younger years is perhaps the time in which a mother-daughter relationship is at its most sensitive. The audience of this film could also be mothers. Hopefully, this production will give an insight into maybe helping mothers understand their daughter’s attitudes more and will help mothers reach out to their daughters and give them more insight into how their mother’s actions and criticism affects them.
“Message To Mother” is an impressionistic documentary. ‘Impressionistic’ meaning that the style of this documentary is poetic, the real idea of it is to be emotional consisting of two conflicting emotions: sadness and happiness. This film is not a fiction film and it would be inappropriate due to the realistic perceptions of real individuals and their own experiences. The basis of this production was a video by BuzzFeedYellow called “Things I wish I Could Tell My Mom”. This video focuses on one female character describing all the things that affect her that her mum says. The feel of this film is sadness, it makes the viewer sympathise with the daughter as she describes the ‘hurtful’ things that her mother says to her, and how her mother is hypocritical due to the fact that her body is the body her mother passed down to her. I aim to bring this into my own production by maybe involving the hypocrisy that mothers say, and potentially involving a feminist take to this. My stylistic choice for this production is based on a documentary I have found on Vouge‘s YouTube page called “Inside The Life Of Bella Thorne”. The interviews with Bella Thorne and her sister is the ideal style that I would like “Message To Mother” to look like. The person being interviewed will be sat in the center of the frame and they will have a busy background. I like this idea as the things around them give off a sense of personality to the environment and the audience gets a feel of the character. The consequence of this ends up being that the audience understands the emotions of the interviewee more and the audience can also see how settled the person is in their own environments. When surrounded in an environment they’re comfortable with, it allows the interviewee to open up, answering questions and saying relatable content which is honest to the camera. Perhaps if someone is exposing their environment they feel a bit vulnerable, and the director can take advantage of this by being able to strip back untrue information to gain the right information that is genuinely how that person feels concerning their relationship between them and their mother. “Message To Mother’s” style includes casual interviews, the subjects of the film positioned in their own environments, emotively reading their speeches that they have written themselves to the audience so the audience feels a sense of maybe sadness or happiness depending on what the main subject has written. The intention of this film is to focus on the narrative of this film. As an aspiring production manager, it is an important aspect to focus on due to the intensive emotive depth of this film and accurate representation is vital to achieving the emotion the is expressed from the participant.
When this film is finished, I hope to send it into film festivals like Sheffield Doc Fest, where it will be seen by many hundreds of people whose intention is to watch documentaries. My documentary should hopefully stand out due to the emotiveness and unusually made production and narrative. This would be significantly relevant to my film since it is a local festival and this will be an advantage to my film as they continue to look for local talent. One other platform I could send it out to is the FaceBook page I made when starting my proof of concept. There is a chance of reaching a wider audience if I were to premiere it on a social media platform due to people being able to share/like/comment on the post. I could release it also on short film websites like shortsoftheweek.com that is a continuous online film competition, and for a small fee of £30 can be entered into a continuous competition between other short films.
Female-Eye Film Festival is an online film festival for female directors. I could submit this here as the deadline is mid-October and by then I will be over 18. I think that the film might be a hit with the female audience as I think this gender will feel more connected to the film as it is more female based. The requirements for this competition are ones which I hope my film will all meet. The aimed audience is at young female girls and mothers who I believe will have more relation within the subject of the film due to it being largely focused on female relationships. Underwire Festival is a film festival which celebrates women in film and gives women the recognition in certain areas. It is a UK based festival and is especially biased towards me being the director in the production of “Message To Mother”.
Kammie Chantrey 