Meaud has an amazing daughter, we would be tempted to tell her if she still doubted it. For several years, Émilie Brisavoine, in her thirties, her daughter, has been trying to understand why this mother is so little made for maternal love and of course why she very quickly abandoned her and her brother, entrusting them while they are very little to a father…
Meaud has an amazing daughter, we would be tempted to tell her if she still doubted it. For several years, Émilie Brisavoine, in her thirties, her daughter, has been trying to understand why this mother is so little made for maternal love and of course why she very quickly abandoned her and her brother, entrusting them while they are very small to a father about whom we will not know much. After a first feature film, “Pauline Tears” already about her family, the filmmaker with a background in applied arts has signed “Maman Tears” presented in the documentary section at the La Rochelle Cinema Festival, this Thursday, July 5, at 5 p.m., at the Dragon, in the presence of the main interested party. Camera in hand, the filmmaker films herself in full introspection, at home, with her son, at her shrink’s, in the middle of a meditation session… but above all takes on her mother, who is most often evasive, and her brother, who suffers from stomach problems, imagines having bowel cancer and drools as much as she does.
Child’s lucidity
It was in the middle of lockdown, and when she had become a mother herself, that Émilie Brisavoine decided to unravel the mystery of this mother who was as whimsical as she was unloving. “I have always been fascinated by my mother. She is a real comic strip character, the way she speaks, the way she dresses… I was writing a fiction on this subject, but I couldn’t do it. Rather than writing about a theoretical mother, and while she was quitting smoking and getting her teeth fixed, I told myself that I was going to capture this period, offer her a strong experience, in the hope of making a film about reconciliation,” the filmmaker explains to us, on the other end of the line. It was also at this time that she came across notebooks written when she was a teenager. Then aged 8 to 17, the young Émilie wrote down all her memories and feelings, without filter and with astonishing lucidity.
Caught up in reality
Of reconciliation, without surprise and we will not say more, there will be little question of it. “Mommy Tears” is not a settling of scores because the filmmaker also discovers the ability to “take her mother as she is”. “A documentary is work in progress. We start with an intuition and we are caught up by reality. I had imagined writing a Disney film with the possibility of authentic dialogue and a happy ending. But life is not Instagrammable. My mom is not a lady like in the commercials. She is not blameless. We have to accept that,” confides the author. Through an introspective story punctuated by WhatsApp calls and images of galaxies, “Maman Tears” addresses the issues of childhood, trauma and more generally intra-family violence, even if here again the filmmaker minimizes what she has crossed. In the festivals where she is programmed, Émilie Brisavoine is each time surprised by the emotion aroused and by these same testimonies which converge around the sufferings of childhood and the difficulties sometimes in becoming adults. The word circulates, thanks to cinema.
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