🎬 Kissable Screens: Everything You Need To Know About Mom

Kissable Screens is a monthly sex-positive program of Cavia, exploring how sexes and bodies are presented in cinema and how we engage its experience critically. This month, we recall moms who unwillingly are deified as saint Maria or fetishised as MILF, we listen to who they are before and after becoming mother and how society constructs their roles and sexualities. We screen three shorts that challenge stereotypes and sentimental views of motherhood by questioning and disrupting assumptions without being judgmental and invite the audience to stare at and demystify the mother figure.

 
Don’t Tell My Mother
Sarah Moon Hove | 2003 | Belgium | 29’ | EN subtitles
 
This film narrates Sarah Moon Howe’s experiences of being a striptease dancer before becoming a mother. Howe employs a personal language through scattered fragments, in a mixture of family archives, images of day-to-day life and dream-like scenes.

 
Call Me Mommy
Tara O’Callaghan | 2022 | Ireland | 15’ | EN spoken

The film follows the experiences of Sinead Connell, a 40-year-old single mother and online sex worker, as she juggles motherhood while pursuing the next chapter of her life through a line of work that carries significant prejudices.

 
Let the Punishment Fit the Child
Maria Beatty | 1997 | United States | 20’ | no dialogue
 
Maria Beatty is a Venezuelan filmmaker who directs, acts, and produces. Her films are often made in black and white and cover various aspects of female sexuality, including BDSM and fetishism. In this film, two women are bonded by strange rituals. They might be “mother” and “daughter,” or two lovers playing games of domination, submission, voyeurism and cruel tenderness.