MA
Feature length documentary - Currently in post production
Producer, Director, DOP
Sean, a gay man in his forties leans over the bed of his mother, Mary, who is close to death and with great tenderness tells her ‘its ok, you can let go’. They are in a flat in Cape Town, thousands of miles from Mary’s home in Dublin. In order to have this moment of peace with his mother at the end of her life Sean had to take her away from her home in Ireland without telling anyone where they were going and he will never be forgiven by the rest of his family for doing it. ‘Ma’ follows Sean and Mary during the last five years of her life leading up to this moment in Cape Town.
The last years of Mary’s life are perhaps her happiest, not despite her dementia but because of it. This is the story of Mary and Sean, mother, and son on an extraordinary journey. As they get closer to the inevitable end they move further away from the violence, addiction and pain that haunted most of their lives and live together totally in the moment.
“I’ve seen some really good movies (about dementia). Those movies, those stories as good as they might be, generally they are showing the person with dementia, with alzheimers as confused..... And thats not my experience. My experience is that the people who are confused are the observers, the people taking care of them or the family members, they are confused. And the only time they (the person with dementia) is really confused or upset is if you correct them...”
Viggo Mortensen, interviewed in 2020 about his film falling.
Ma is a film about a person with dementia/alzheimers who was not corrected, who was not made to feel that she was a lesser version of a person she once was but rather she was embraced as she was and encouaged and facilitated to live each moment of the last years of her life to the fullest.
In 2015 I had known Sean and Mary for a few years already. He called me one day and said, ‘Ma has dementia, it’s quite bad now, but the funny thing is she is really happy, maybe for the first time in her life’. He invited me to come to Ireland and said, ‘Bring a camera’.
The film that I have now shot came out of a collaboration with Sean that is much more than simply observing him as a subject. Given the sensitivity of the subject I believe it could not be any other way and he continues to be an important part of the project going forward.
Between 2015 and 2019 I made 12 trips to film Sean and Mary living in the bubble he had created for them, first in Ireland, then Italy and finally in South Africa. In the background was a very dramatic story that stemmed from their traumatic past, but watching them together living totally in the present was a beautiful and profound thing.