Mother and I

Mother and I  follows one immigrant daughter's relationship with her mother across continents and decades— a story of duty, distance, loss, and the quiet ways life renews itself even in grief.


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"It is very beautiful, powerful, and personal."

-Pat Freeman, viewer

Mother and I tells the story of an ordinary mother-daughter relationship spanning continents — a story of duty, love, conflict, loss, reconciliation, and the quiet rejuvenation of life, in which death and life unfold not as opposites but as a single continuing process. Rooted in the filmmaker's own relationship with her mother, "Bou" moves between the intimacy of personal memory and the wider, near-universal question of how families — and immigrant families in particular — cope with caring for and eventually losing parents when children live far from home.



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Exposition




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The film grew out of a deeply personal need to document and make sense of a relationship shaped by distance - the recurring immigrant experience of loving a parent from thousands of miles away, and the grief and reckoning that follow when that distance collides with aging and mortality. Rather than treating this as a private hardship, the documentary frames it as part of a larger, shared conversation: as more families are scattered across continents by migration, the questions of who cares for aging parents, how, and from how far away become urgent and universal. By grounding that larger question in one specific, ordinary relationship, the film aims to help viewers recognize their own lives, experiences, trials, tribulations, and triumphs within it.



About the Director

Annapurna Devi Pandey — Filmmaker, Researcher, Producer/Director

Annapurna Devi Pandey is an anthropologist, documentary filmmaker, and researcher whose work bridges scholarship and storytelling. Her scholarship centers on diasporic South Asian communities, eldercare in Odisha, handloom weavers, and tribal land and environmental justice. She has been affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.




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