“The Tree Can Still Bear Fruit”: Laurie Townshend Discusses Her Staceyann Chin Doc ‘A Mother Apart’

“After I did years of work around my own healing, I began to see my mother’s leaving me was perhaps the first wound. The greatest subsequent wombs were the people who told me all the things that happened to you because your mother left… you should not speak them.” 

So begins Laurie Townshend’s A Mother Apart, a documentary that allows Staceyann Chin to tell the story of her abandonment by her mother, Hazel. Chin proudly identifies as Caribbean, Black, Asian, lesbian, a woman, and a resident of New York City, as well as a Jamaican national who has spent her entire career speaking candidly about her own life. Her truths traverse forms like stage plays (Motherstruck), memoirs (The Other Side of Paradise), and poetry collections (Crossfire: A Litany for Survival). Her commitment to speaking aloud, boldly, and plainly is integral to Chin’s artistry—A Mother Apart feels like a continuation of that work. 

It was very clear from the film’s screening at BlackStar that A Mother Apart is a collaborative effort made with care. I went in blindly, arriving at the Kimmel Center with my homegirl Stephanye Watts of the Be Reel Black Cinema Club. It was the perfect festival to see a film like this. Like Steph pointed out when we were there, it was great to hear aloud the “hmmms” and laughter as well as silence when ruminating upon an idea in tandem. Seeing it with this particular audience was truly resonant, a testament to the community that Maori Karmael Holmes and the BlackStar team have built. Not only because of the meticulous thinking behind the programming, which brought about a great deal of amazing documentary films about the intricacies of Black life, but because the lifeblood of the festival is rooted in showcasing Black, Brown, and Indigenous stories. 

I’m certain that much like me, most of the Black folks in the audience had some baseline understanding or familiarity with the work of Staceyann Chin. I watched her perform her poetry on YouTube during free periods in high school, at a time when the work of Black women writers became a vehicle for me to explore the interiority of my own life. In fact, while watching the film I thought about the Zora Neale Hurston quote: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” I began to feel thankful to have come from a lineage of Black women who also refused silence and secrecy, constantly reinforcing within me the importance of my own voice. 

One of the most compelling parts of A Mother Apart is the way Laurie and Staceyann allow us a front-row seat into the raising of Zuri, Staceyann’s daughter. It reminded me of the immense closeness I feel with my own mother, who also went to great lengths to honor my autonomy. There are scenes where we see her often ask Zuri for permission to do or if she wants to do something. During a scene where Staceyann is out of the country, we see her converse with Zuri on Facetime, floating in and out of frame is another Black woman that I imagine is taking care of her while her mom is out of town. A common occurrence of course, but also continued to showcase the litany of ways mothering and nurturing for us and especially Black queer folks, transcends the narrow idea that to mother means solely to give birth within a nuclear family structure. 

The dexterity of Laurie’s filmmaking allows for there to be no enemies and villains (other than the oppressive systems that would drive Hazel away from Jamaica to begin with). Hazel is still able to maintain her personhood and be treated with humanity while also holding space for the feelings of her daughters, one of which she abandoned and the other to which she was not the kindest or most nurturing. In our interview, we talked about the genesis of the film, shooting remotely during the pandemic, mothering oneself, and the ethics of care while working on A Mother Apart. This interview has been edited and condensed.

DOCUMENTARY: As I know this is your first feature, what was your background prior to filmmaking, and what was your relationship to Stacyann Chin’s work prior to making this film? 

LAURIE TOWNSHEND: I consider myself to always be a teacher. But more formally, I was a middle school teacher in the public school system here in Toronto for a couple of decades. I taught drama and English for the most part to 12 and 13-year-olds. And because of my love for storytelling, I always try to find opportunities for my worlds to collide and to overlap. As the drama teacher, it lent to a lot of  opportunities to run a film club, for instance. We had one of the largest middle school film festivals in a public school setting in Toronto. I didn’t know anyone else who was doing that. These were 12, 13, 14-year-olds who wrote, directed, acted in, and edited their own films, and we had the whole red carpet in the middle of the day with invited guests. I would use information that I gathered from attending conferences at  TIFF in my teaching and in the way that I led the film club. I often joked that I was moonlighting as a filmmaker because teaching is really very much a full-time job. Being involved in my community, Black Lives Matter Toronto, I was involved in a lot of activations around the city and I would show up with my camera and document for the organization—not as an official photographer or anything, just as a concerned member of the community and the affected group that was reeling from so many really, really hard things that were happening in the world. 

I noticed a lot of mothers on the front lines with their kids, some mothers that I knew, some I didn’t. And I started doing street photography and interviewing them informally. And I started to see that there was this real surge, this impulse toward bringing their children into these spaces as a way of building them up, pouring into them, letting them know that they were in community. So I got the idea to do a film about Black mother activists. I wanted to know what it was that compelled them to involve their kids in the ways they did and their hopes and dreams and fears and all those things. 

I had four moms in total. By this point, I had the National Film Board and OYA Media Group on board as producers. Staceyann was the fourth mom. And I just knew of her because I was aware of her work. Every Jamaican, particularly Jamaican queer people in North America, know who Staceyann Chin is. I had seen her in 2008 when she came to Toronto to do a book reading for her memoir The Other Side of Paradise. And so I reached out to her through a mutual friend and I told her I  was doing this doc on black mother activists, would she be willing to meet with me? I took a Megabus for 50 bucks or so down to New York on my March break to meet with her for the first time. Zuri was five and we started talking about what it was to be moms. I was trying actively to become a mom through IVF treatments and that sort of thing. As we went through development, her story became the salient story. It became apparent that there was this ongoing, unraveling story with her mother and I  wanted to focus on that. And so that became A Mother Apart. 

D: I really love when you talk about reading Alexis Pauline Gumb’s work. One of my favorite things about the film is that it doesn’t have this gender essentialist view of what mothering is, which I think is actually very kind of inextricably linked to black womanhood in a lot of ways. We’re constantly raising one another, whether it’s through friendship, like you said, or aunties raising each other’s kids. You mentioned in the Q&A that the film is a vehicle to explore self-mothering for you. I was wondering if you can speak more to that. 

LT: That was the idea that films in the work that we make can shape us. I often say, we shape stories and  thereafter they shape us, and that’s not my own quote, it’s a riff off of a quote attributed to Chomsky, who co-wrote Manufacturing Consent. Anyway, I found myself shaped by this experience of making this film. Like I mentioned, I was very much convinced that the only way for me to be a mom was to have a child of my own. Being in a same-sex relationship, that meant going through numerous steps to try to make that happen, spending tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments and getting sick at one point. In pursuing motherhood in the ways that I was abandoning myself in a lot of ways, it’s  not what I truly wanted. The way that Staceyann is raising Zuri, the things that I witnessed: the compassion, the care, the patience. The way she gives room for Zuri to just be herself, the way she gives room for Zuri to make mistakes—these were all attributes of mothering that I realized I wasn’t doing for me. I found myself,  especially during COVID, so grateful that it hadn’t worked out. I was able to turn inward and care for  myself in the ways that I needed to during COVID. And then soon after, my mom got really sick and I became her caregiver. 

I was able to take on that role, to mother my mother, for the last three years of her life. She passed away in November of 2023. And I have no regrets about that. And I’m so grateful that I credit this  film and this journey that I’ve been on with that clarity around what I really wanted. And so now I’m in a place of grief and also taking those same lessons about care and patience and grace with myself because  I’m in yet another experience that’s not linear at all. 

D: I’m sorry for your loss, by the way. 

Can you also talk to me about how this film traverses lands? I loved how kind of when it begins, it feels a bit like this mystery actually in form a little bit. Where it’s like, okay, we’re going house to house. And then by the end,  we’re in Germany. I don’t want to give too much away. But you essentially had this kind of international production—you’re in Montreal, you’re in Jamaica, you’re in New York, you’re in Germany. What was that like as a filmmaker, dealing with all of that at once and making sure to keep track of this story?

LT: When you’re in it, you don’t know what’s going to be the story. For a long time we thought that it was about finding Hazel. Staceyann kept saying she was going to go look for her mother as soon as she could. She was going to get on a plane to Germany as soon as things opened up. 

We knew that we were going to be with her while she did that. We took a skeleton crew to Germany. It was just me, my DP, and the sound person. So I was driving on the Autobahn doing what I  had to do, and that’s when we met her sister. But as you’ll see in the film,  that’s not the main focus of the film. In some ways the physical search was kind of the metaphor for the other types of searches we do to find our mothers. For the last few years I’ve been on a search to find my inner mother. And so yeah, I think that it worked out nicely that we had that physical search as part of the film. 

We see Staceyann wrestle with the feminist in her who wonders if her mom never missed them to the daughter who can’t quite step into that place of grace. It was truly fascinating. That moment where she calls me out for falling under her mom’s spell was a really real moment. It demonstrates just how messy, it’s not neat. It’s not a neat forgiveness and healing is not simple. It’s really complex. And yeah, it’s okay that she can be one day really moved by her mom’s story and the next day indignant. We’re allowed to be human in this film. 

D: Zuri is a brilliant and sweet, precious child. I was so happy that she was  included in the film. I love the note that the film ends on about how one day she’ll get her say as to Staceyann’s mothering. And I love that this film kind of deals with intergenerational trauma in a lot of ways. Can you speak to striking that balance in the editing process or when putting this film together. 

LT: I have to give credit where credit is due—editor Sonia Godding Togobo, a mom of two, a Black woman. First of all, how many Black women editors can you name offhand? I didn’t know many when I started this process. Our producers, all mothers, we had an eye for that. We’re all tired of the trauma Olympics and other shows trying to outdo each other in terms of showing us at our worst. 

At the end of the film, there’s this montage with Zuri hula-hooping, and you see the breadth of emotions. She’s crying on her mom and then she’s hula hooping. And the voiceover is something to the effect of, “I see Zuri and she’s a whole human being.” And it just goes to show you that no matter how broken the tree branches may be, the tree can still bear fruit. That hints at being whole. And that’s the film  I wanted to make from the moment, from day one. 

D: And you did it. Congratulations. Are you working on something new?

LT: Staceyann and I are really excited about the impact campaign that we’re going to be launching. I call it a little traveling road show. I mean, the conversations that we’ve been having with women after screenings, before screenings are just—this is what I want to spend my life doing. It really is an extension of what I did in the classroom. We’ll be doing special screenings in colleges and universities, in community centers, in circles of women, mothers, and other mothers, continuing these conversations and being able to keep all of these rich learnings and teachings.

My next project,  it’s going to be about a woman, another... I’m really fascinated by women who do seemingly little acts of courage that have huge repercussions for the world or for their community. I have, in very, very early stages of development, a project about a woman (a former professional basketball player), and the journey that she’s on in a particular fight that happens to be off the court. I don’t even have a producer for that yet. But the point is, I do want to keep making films, I’m not returning to the classroom. And so any project that I do, I suspect any project that I’m going to spend four or five, six years of my life on, it’s got to be something personal. And that’s just the way I work. To me, it’s all about relationships and so I have a relationship with this basketball player, this woman I was talking about. And we’re just in the early stages of developing that story and understanding what our journey might be together as she fights for her health and for her family and takes all the lessons she’s learned from basketball, applying them to her life off the court.

Tayler Montague is a writer, filmmaker, film programmer, and native New Yorker. Her work can be found at www.taylermontague.xy.