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What began as a film document (recording Nana before she died) evolves into the filmmaker's search for her roots, her relationship with her family, and her identity as a woman. Using photographs, old home movies and direct interviews Amalie R. Rothschild explores the mother-daughter ties in 3 generations of her own family and in the process explores the classic female problem faced by her artist mother: the conflict between work and children--the necessary compromises, the incumbent anxieties. The structure is intentionally loose and open-ended, like a good conversation, emphasizing the need to ask the right questions rather than give pat answers.
...In its truthfulness and...its commitment to finding a means to bridge the generations, Nana, Mom, and Me is an important contribution to film biography and contemporary documentary.
Patricia Erens
Film Library Quarterly
full review
...a moving account of three generations of women...which goes beyond the semi-authenticity of the documentary style into real creativity.
Margaret Mead
American Anthropologist
full review
Nana, Mom, and Me seems to have reached deeper into the fertile terrain of mother/daughter relationships than any film of recent times.
The Feminist Art Journal
...causes viewers to consider their family relationships. Provocative for film programs on the family in public libraries, religious and community organizations; also valuable for courses in marriage and the family, sociology, and counseling on the high school and college level. Ages 15 to adult.
Irene Wood
Booklist Vol. 69, No.9
full review
In Nana, Mom, and Me, Amalie Rothschild meets an immovable object in a grandmother who refuses to talk about her life (and 27 year marriage to an invalid), but out of this failure comes an unexpected success. Unable to draw out the member of her family with whom she feels a special affinity she turns to her own mother for information, and in the process it is her mother's interesting, complex portrait that emerges. We see through old photographs and home movies the classic conflict between a woman (the grandmother) who is beautiful and social, and her only girl, a plain child, being forced into unsuitable frocks, and later into make-up, that only emphasize the gap between society's ideal feminity and her own. She eventually becomes an artist, and the story of her application, in an environment that offered little encouragement, is a heroic one.
Molly Haskell
The Village Voice
AWARDS & SCREENINGS:
- Biografilm Festival, Italy 2007 Award for pioneering role in genre of Film Autobiography
- Rotterdam & Nyon Film Festivals
- Museum of Modern Art
- The Smithsonian Institution "Kin & Communities Symposium"
- National Council on Family Relations Annual Conference
- Edinburgh Film Festival
- Orson Welles Cinema, Boston
- Annenberg Cinematheque
- Pacific Film Archive
- American Film Institute Theater
- The Hirshhorn Museum
- WNET-TV
- American Anthropological Association Conference
- American Ortho-Psychiatric Association Conference
- American Sociological Association Conference
- American Museum of Naturnal History
- Finalist, American Film Festival
