HealingBy John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
In Motherland, six middle-aged women facing the nightmare of losing a child is about as dramatic a documentary as could be without tipping into sentimentality and phony re-enactment. Off to Africa they go to help needy children and help themselves soothe their lingering doubts, regrets, and absurdity of losing a child to gang murder or suicide, to cite the two poles. Director Jennifer Steinman carefully cuts between the women with the appreciative children in the new country and the six individual stories of grief.
As in any human drama, fact or fiction, not everyone gets with the program. Mary Helena, an older African American who has suffered a stroke, takes the longest to expunge the grief and grow in the experience of healing yourself while you are healing others.
Steinman edits fluidly, with the individual stories intercut with the larger context of the journey and the group rehabilitation. She spends little time with the African children who are either orphaned or suffering from AIDS. Such a tactic throws the spotlight squarely on the grieving mothers, whose healing never seems certain, a point in the filmmaker's favor. All agree the hurt can be assuaged but never effaced.
The lack of excessive emotion is also strength of the film; with no climactic moment or catharsis, the women slowly ameliorate without a false documentary denouement of hope. As always for me is the suspicion that moving moments are re-enactments. Also I am conscious of the camera's intimate journey with the women and mindful that they are different from what they might ordinarily be because of that camera's presence.
If I had my way, there'd be no intrusive camera, and wouldn't that lead to the death of the documentary as a genre?
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com