A young single mother finds herself burdened with the full-time custody of her troubled 15-year-old son in Director Xavier Dolan’s dramatic feature Mommy.
In this French-language film from Canada, Diane (Anne Dorval), a widow making ends meet with cleaning jobs, has her life turned upside down when her aggressively unstable ADHD teenage son Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon) is discharged from a care facility. As they both struggle with the transition and dealing with Steve’s issues, they are befriended by Kyla (Suzanne Clément), a shy schoolteacher recovering from a breakdown, who helps them find hope.
Mommy shared the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival along with Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language 3D, and was nominated for the Palme d'Or.
Following the screening in the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on November 19, Dolan discussed the challenges of making Mommy as well as some of the themes that run through the director's work in a conversation moderated by Global Cinema subcommittee Chair Victoria Hochberg (The Chris Isaak Show).
A native of Québec, the 25-year-old Dolan’s other films include Tom at the Farm and Heartbeats; the Genie Award-winning features Laurence Anyways and I Killed My Mother; and the video short College Boy: Indochine.
The DGA Special Projects Global Cinema subcommittee members are: Victoria Hochberg (Chair), Jon Amiel, Kathryn Bigelow, Jim Drake, Alexander Payne, Barbara Roche, and Arthur Allan Seidelman.