Dartmouth Films’ documentary Your Mum and Dad will be released in UK cinemas and Curzon Home Cinema from 29th April.
Inspired by Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This be the Verse’, her most personal project yet is an exploration of the powerful dynamics of family relationships and the way they shape our lives. In part an autobiographical study of intergenerational trauma from TV Journalist and director Klaartje Quirijns, Your Mum and Dad is at once a very personal and intimate exploration into family trauma and therapy, and at the same time a universal, relatable story.
Klaartje Quirijns:
“I made this film out of a personal need and although the stories are very specific, they seem to touch people universally. We forget as humans that we have so much in common.”
In the Netherlands, Quirijns made programmes for the respected VPRO, IKON and NPS stations – and has received the CINE Golden Eagle Trophy, Courmayeur Noir Film Festival, Première Berlinale and Prix Italia award for her documentary filmmaking. She was also nominated for the European Film Award for Best Documentary for The Dictator Hunter.
After 17 years of documenting her friend – Michael Moskowitz’s personal struggle to heal from a generational wound by filming his intimate therapy sessions, Quirijns also turns the camera on herself to reveal her own family’s devastating trauma before she was born – the sudden loss of an older sister she never knew in a tragic accidental drowning.
As she speaks to her parents for the first time about their loss, raw conversations and the process of the family’s therapy is shared in a poignant insight into healing after tragedy. Your Mum and Dad deftly navigates the consequences of the accident for all involved, even Klaartje’s daughters a generation later, as the director hopes to lead by example with frank and empathetic discussions about mental health.
In Czechoslovakia before the upheaval of World War II, Michael Moskowitz’s Jewish mother left home at seventeen without knowing if she would ever see her family again. What followed was a lifetime of trauma and dislocation for both her and her son. Allowed into the inner sanctum of the therapy room, filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns follows Moskowitz’s work with a New York-based therapist named Dr Kirkland Vaughans. Vaughans – one of the few African-American Freudian therapists in the United States – guides us through the complex workings of the mind, showing how easily we can be “colonised” by the behaviour of our parents. But in explaining these recurring patterns, he can’t help but be drawn into exploring his own painful past as well.
Using a wealth of home movies and archival images – as well as taped therapy sessions – Your Mum and Dad explores recurring behavioural themes and raises individual cases into a universal pattern of experience. These stories enter the minds of the viewers and provide a mirror with which they can see the pain and triumphs of their own lives.
Your Mum and Dad is in UK cinemas and Curzon Home Cinema from 29 April following its premiere at Curzon Soho on 26th April.
