Αn affective and feminist screening/ encounter about mother- daughter relationships.

Mother - Daughter on screen
Αn affective and feminist screening/ encounter about mother- daughter relationships.

Ngozi Onwurah

The body beautiful
23 minutes, Color, 16mm, England, 1991
This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy. The filmmaker plumbs the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion in an unforgettable tribute starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.

Black British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah takes on the issues of time and space in her work which embraces heterogeneity and multiple sites of subjectivity. Onwurah consistently navigates and challenges the limits of narrative and ethnographic cinema by insisting that the body is the central landscape of an anti-imperialist cinematic discourse. An accomplished director with several episodes of the top British TV drama series "Heartbeat" to her credit, Ngozi Onwurah also wrote and directed the prize-winning feature "Welcome II the Terrordome." Sometimes fierce and at others more gently humorous, Onwurah tackles the clashes and ironies of the apparent gulf separating black and white, whilst showing that under the skin, emotions are universal. Onwurah’s films have won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival, Germany; Melbourne Film Festival, Australia; Toronto Film Festival, Canada; and at NBPC, USA.

Michelle Citron

Daughter Rite, 53 minutes, Color, 16mm, 1978
Daughter Rite is a classic, the missing link between the 'direct Cinema' documentaries and the later hybrids that acknowledged truth couldn't always be found in front of a camera lens. Scandalous in its day for bending the rules of representation to enlighten its audience about filmmaking, DAUGHTER RITE has a lot to teach folks hooked on reality TV, too. Citron's documentary inquiries into feminism, women in the trades, and feminist approaches to media representation are time capsules that merit re-opening.

Michelle Citron has made numerous media pieces including the interactive narratives; AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE, COCKTAILS & APPETIZERS, AND MIXED GREENS, and the films WHAT YOU TAKE FOR GRANTED, LEFTOVERS, and DAUGHTER RITE, a ground breaking experimental narrative about mothers and daughters. Her work has been shown in museums and film festivals around the world including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the American Film Institute and the New Directors, Berlin, London, and Edinburgh Film Festivals. Her films are distributed worldwide and are in over 200 permanent collections.