An Oya Media Group and NFB co-production

An emotionally sweeping tale of healing and forgiveness, A Mother Apart accompanies powerhouse Jamaican-American poet and LGBTQ+ activist Staceyann Chin as she re-imagines the essential art of mothering—having been abandoned by her own mother.

How do you raise a child when your own mother abandoned you? In a remarkable story of healing and forgiveness, Jamaican-American poet and LGBTQ+ activist Staceyann Chin, renowned for performances in Def Poetry Slam and hit solo shows like MotherStruck!, radically re-imagines the essential art of mothering. In seeking her elusive mother—a trail that leads to Brooklyn, Montreal, Cologne and, finally, Jamaica—Staceyann and her daughter forge a new sense of home.

“My mother’s leaving me was the first wound.”

Staceyann Chin embodies multiple complex identities—poet, activist, lesbian, Jamaican American, mother. But the most complicated of all is “daughter.”

Abandoned by her mother as a child, Staceyann has been seeking her out for decades, travelling the globe in a one-sided attempt to forge a meaningful bond with the woman who brought her into the world.

And now, as the sole parent of nine-year-old Zuri, she wrestles with an all-consuming dilemma: how to mother a daughter when your own mother was missing in action.

In an extraordinary tale of grace and forgiveness, filmmaker Laurie Townshend profiles one woman’s inspired and deeply intentional parenting. A Mother Apart catches up with Staceyann as she picks up the trail of her elusive mother—a trail that leads to Brooklyn, Montreal, Cologne and, finally, back to her native Jamaica. Along the way she just may find the sense of home she’s been longing for.

A healing journey spanning three generations, the film is punctuated with vivid animation, imagery from personal archives and excerpts from Staceyann’s arresting live performances. Her singularly intersectional voice, showcased in the legendary Def Poetry Slam and hit solo shows like MotherStruck!, infuses A Mother Apart with deep compassion and commanding intelligence.

Poet, actor, and performing artist Staceyann Chin is the author of the new poetry collection Crossfire: A Litany For Survival, the critically acclaimed memoir The Other Side of Paradise, cowriter and original performer in the Tony Award–winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, and author of the one-woman shows Hands Afire, Unspeakable Things, Border/Clash, and MotherStruck. She has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and 60 Minutes, and her poetry been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She proudly identifies as Caribbean, Black, Asian, lesbian, a woman, and a resident of New York City, as well as a Jamaican national.

My journey as a filmmaker is deeply rooted in a personal quest for connection.

Connection for me means cultivating relationships with creative and technical collaborators, deepening trust and empathy with members of my community and committing to the lifelong journey of integrating parts of myself through a reflective practice.

Like the historically marginalized women I choose to centre in my work, I exist at the intersection of multiple identities. I am a Black woman, a lesbian, an educator and a filmmaker. I was born in Canada and raised by a Jamaican mom, which means I love snowboarding as much as I love swimming in the waters of the Caribbean.

In 2012, I found myself at another intersection of identity as I contemplated what it would mean to become a mom. As I embarked on what would be a tumultuous seven-year journey of fertility treatments, I also found myself documenting the Black Lives Matter movement in Toronto. Whether photographing a vigil in a west-end neighbourhood or a rally in the downtown core, a particular image kept emerging—mothers and their children, hand in hand, raised fists and voices unified in cries for justice.

I became very curious about what felt like an intentional choice on the part of parents across the city to include their children in politicized activities. It also made me consider my own values while interrogating the kind of mother I might be, should my fertility saga end with having a child of my own.

I continued to explore the theme of motherhood through reading, street photography and conducting interviews with mothers who were part of my community, as well as with strangers I would meet while travelling. In 2016, I got the idea to adapt the many powerful and courageous stories I had collected into a documentary treatment that focused on what it meant to raise Black children in times of conflict and change. Beloved LGBTQ+ spoken-word poet, writer and performer Staceyann Chin (whom I had encountered at a reading of her memoir several years prior) was the first person I reached out to.

While her biography chronicles her harrowing story of growing up in Jamaica without her mother, who abandoned her as an infant, Staceyann was raising her then five-year-old daughter Zuri in ways that seemed to defy the trauma of her childhood. From her off-Broadway play Motherstruck! to the popular YouTube series she recorded with Zuri, Staceyann stood as a template for radical mothering. A model that inspired me both as a queer woman still pursuing motherhood and as a filmmaker embarking on her first feature documentary.

Over the next four years, the development process brought focus and clarity to the themes that marked pivotal moments in Staceyann’s life: maternal abandonment, immigration, homophobia, feminist activism, art and healing. At the very same time these big ideas came together to ground the film, the ground beneath me trembled with the growing realization that motherhood—for me—was not to be.

Early in the film’s development phase, I read an anthology titled Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (Gumbs, Martens and Williams, 2016). In her essay “m/other ourselves: a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs quotes feminist icon Audre Lorde, who wrote, “We can learn to mother ourselves.” I didn’t understand this phrase at the time, but looking back, I can see that during those years—when personal heartbreak was compounded by filmmaking challenges—I was being primed for a comforting truth: motherhood takes many forms, and arguably the most important iteration of the role is when one learns to mother oneself.

While making A Mother Apart, I got to witness the way Staceyann confronted the belief that she must not have been worth staying for—overcoming it to become the powerful, provocative and loving mother we see on screen. I resonated deeply with her commitment to making space for Zuri to be her authentic self. I was moved by the ways she honoured Zuri’s burgeoning voice, encouraged her to take risks and provided a soft landing should Zuri make a mistake or fail. Each sacred act of mothering documented by our cameras mirrored the care and empathy I aimed to bring to my relationship with my own mother, and eventually to myself.

Altogether, we spent six-and-a-half years making A Mother Apart. More than six years of wonderful and sometimes difficult conversations about our immigrant mothers; many Zoom calls, remote pandemic interviews, shoots in Montreal, Brooklyn, Jamaica and Germany; storyboarding and all-night edit sessions—resulting in a film that is equal parts heartbreaking and triumphant.

As audiences engage with Staceyann’s remarkable story, I trust they’ll understand that it is in fact a miracle to exist in the face of inequities and violence disproportionately experienced by women, immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community. I trust viewers will witness a mother’s radical love and know that they, too, can transform trauma into triumph.

Contact NFB Publicist for broadcast–quality excerpts.