Metro Cinema Society: At My Mother's Breast

At My Mother's Breast

Canada 2005, 55 min, Beta SP, Dir: Heather Watson-Burgess

Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Winnipeg filmmaker Heather Watson-Burgess's At My Mother's Breast is an intimate and intensely moving personal documentary that chronicles the courage of the women in her family as they confront the biology that has bequeathed them a terrible, and apparently inevitable, destiny. "Watson-Burgess describes herself as 'the daughter of a woman with breast cancer, who is the daughter of a woman with breast cancer, who is the daughter of a woman with breast cancer.' Her destiny clear to her from a very young age, the filmmaker turns the camera on her own family to capture the love, support, grief and the difficult choices that have to be made when breast cancer is part of the family legacy. She interviews her aunts (all of whom, save one, have had breast cancer), her cousins (most of whom are daughters of women with breast cancer) and takes us inside a family wherein mother-daughter dynamics are turned upside-down, where the level of honesty and support is truly inspiring and where difficult questions have to be asked and answered. A directorial debut, At My Mother's Breast is a beautifully insightful and poignant film" (Vancouver I.F.F.).

NOTE: This is a free screening, as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Donations will go to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.