Ma Mère

Young Elsie is shocked to learn that her eccentric mother wanted her ashes to be scattered among her five ex-husbands. Elsie is adamant about carrying out her mother's wishes, but the trip fundamentally alters her course.

Young single mother has two sons and a daughter by three different fathers who are completely unaware of having fathered them. Anne's mother conjures up a plot to make everyone involved to go on a beach holiday in Mexico at the same time so that her grandchildren could meet their fathers and their new families.

"Music is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself." This quote from Claude Debussy describes the musical world of this programme, made up of his own works and works by Maurice Ravel. In the choreography of Ravel's and Debussy's music by Jeroen Verbruggen and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, fluid lines, dream and atmosphere are strongly present.

A dance set to Pierre Boulez's recording of Ravel's Ma Mere l'Oye

With their beloved mother only a few days to live, her children decide to give her a surprising parting gift: bring Dave, a lifelong fan, to her bedside in the Ardennes. But even though everyone adores her, brothers, sister and brother-in-law are not on the best of terms and cooperation is not their strong point. For her sake, however, they will overcome their resentments, drawing from their love the energy and the madness necessary to carry out their project. Finding Dave and luring him to the Ardennes will be no easy task.

Benedict missed Mother's funeral. He was stuck in the Eurostar. In the offbeat as always, and a little pitiful, he joined the family home to find his brother, his two sisters - and in a merry bazaar, many memories. There, in the remnants of his childhood, in the intimacy of his room, he sees her - She is waiting for him. And she will not let go.

An old woman is sitting with motionless and two eyes closed. Suddenly, a visitor shows up in the courtyard of the house while she is looking at the sunlight through a window. The turtle and a door open onto her memories and it makes her think of a memory about a rosary. The images of an unforgettable past remain in her mind with longing about her missing son.

With an empathetic and intimate lens, veteran filmmaker Denys Desjardins captures his elderly mother's experience of neglect in Quebec's healthcare system and his sister's fight to secure her an acceptable long-term care solution.

14-year-old Tania starts to become aware that the boys at school are interested in her at the same time as she learns that her mother has breast cancer.

During one year, Evelyne shot the demolition of her factory to please her daughter. When Charlotte decides, a few years later, to confront her mother with her footage, things don't go off as planned. A documentary comedy in which mother and daughter try, each in their own way, to make cinema.

Ten year old Noemie, fed up with being shunted from one separated parent's home to another, puts her foot down and demands to stay in one place all the time. The new arrangement, however, turns out to be a nightmare.

An adopted boy who, as a taciturn adult, visits his birth mother and strikes up a relationship fraught with tension and emotion.

Filmmaker Claude Demers tells the story of his search for his biological mother and their eventual meeting. He does this in voice-over, accompanied by images from Canada's national archives. The painstakingly selected and fluidly edited black-and-white clips build up, like the perfectly fitting pieces of a puzzle; an impression of his mother as he had imagined her. How she grew up, worked, loved and left him.

The narrative thread in Taysir Batniji’s video is a telephone conversation between the artist located in France and his mother located in Gaza. Starting from this intimate, fluctuant, fragmented, difficult and sometimes indistinct exchange, the artist questions the resonance of words like displacement, in-between and exile. Through a triple point of view, Ma mère, David et moi explores how to look at one’s home from elsewhere and how to establish connexions by combining narration, souvenirs, impressions, the personal story and information documents.

Documentary about Djibril Diop Mambety.