2014 / 139 minutes / French with subtitles / Color
Directed by: Xavier Dolan
Print supplied by: Roadside Attractions c/o Movie Licensing USA

Thursday, July 23rd, 2015
7:00pm
at The Mason O. Damon Auditorium at Buffalo Central Library

Please join us for a FREE one-night screening event of Mommy [2014]: Canada’s official selection for Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards and winner of the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

Stop in early to be sure to score a FREE soft pretzel Breadhive Cooperative Bakery!

Summer 2015 Season Sponsor: Community Beer Works
Event Sponsors: Buffalo Pug & Small Breed Rescue; Perk’s Cafe and Market & BreadHive Cooperative Bakery
Ticket Information: FREE

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Synopsis courtesy of Roadside Attractions:

A passionate widowed single mom (Anne Dorval) finds herself burdened with the full-time custody of her unpredictable 15-year-old ADHD son (Antoine Olivier Pilon). As they struggle to make ends meet, Kyla (Suzanne Clément), the peculiar new neighbor across the street, offers her help. Together, they strive for a new sense of balance.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE:

Since my first film, I’ve talked a lot about love.

I’ve talked about teenage hood, sequestration and transsexualism. I’ve talked about Jackson Pollock and the 90s, about alienation and homophobia. Boarding schools and the very French-Canadian word “special”, milking the cows, Stendhal’s crystallization and the Stockholm syndrome. I’ve talked some pretty salty slang and I’ve talked dirty too. I’ve talked in English, every once in a while, and I’ve talked through my hat one too many times.

Cause that’s the thing when you “talk” about things, I guess, is that there is always this almost unavoidable risk of talking shit. Which is why I always decided to stick to what I knew, or what was -more or less – close to my skin. Subjects I thought I thoroughly or sufficiently knew because I knew my own difference or the suburb I was brought up in. Or because I knew how vast my fear of others was, and still is. Because I knew the lies we tell ourselves when we live in secret, or the useless love we stubbornly give to time thieves. These are things I’ve come close enough to to actually want to talk about them.

But should there be one, just one subject I’d know more than any other, one that would unconditionally inspire me, and that I love above all, it certainly would be my mother. And when I say my mother, I think I mean THE mother at large, the figure she represents.

Because it’s her I always come back to. It’s her I want to see winning the battle, her I want to invent problems to so she can have the credit of solving them all, her through whom I ask myself questions, her I want to hear shout out loud when we didn’t say a thing. It’s her I want to be right when we were wrong, it’s her, no matter what, who’ll have the last word.

Back in the days of I Killed My Mother, I felt like I wanted to punish my mom. Only five years have passed ever since, and I believe that, through Mommy, I’m now seeking her revenge. Don’t ask.

— Xavier Dolan, May 2014