Leave Nothing Behind

Twice a week I reach out to my mother to see how she is doing. I am recording her as a way to document our conversations and reflect on our relationship. Sitting hundreds of miles away, I often thought how I would move away and wouldn’t miss home. When I moved for graduate school in 2018, I was optimistic to start a new chapter for myself. But as the months passed I became increasingly homesick. I missed my mother, my home, and my state more than I had expected. On trips home to visit during holidays and breaks I would record my mother, her space, and her objects within our apartment. During the last several months of the Covid-19 pandemic quarantine, I went through the videos trying to make sense of what I captured. By documenting my mother in her space, I hoped to find an understanding of who she was and who she has become. The collective narrative I found is multi layered. It is about my mother, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia who moved to Germany in the 1970’s and our shared experience of living in a motel for thirteen years when she first came to America in 1990. I found many questions, but one was ever present. What does it mean when you can’t go home again? Leave Nothing Behind is a documentary film in progress that is a deeper narrative than just my mother’s life, the motel, and our relationship. The film exhibits the schisms and failures of the American dream, a hopeful vision that turns into disappointment. It expresses the condemnation of women in systems, and patriarchal constructs that leave no room for women to progress and thrive. It illustrates the intimate and visceral relationship of mother and daughter within a family structure, while considering the notion of resignation and conflict.