Mommy Mommy
Encyclopedia
Mommy Mommy is a 2007 documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
directed by Sylvie Rosenthal about a Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
couple's five-year long struggle to have a child.
Background
The film's subjects had been long-time friends and business associates with Rezolution PicturesRezolution Pictures
Rezolution Pictures is a film and television production company based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, focusing primarily on Canadian Aboriginal productions. The company was founded by the husband and wife team of Ernest Webb and Catherine Bainbridge in 2001...
co-founders Catherine Bainbridge and Ernest Webb, who thought that their personal story would help to illustrate the growing phenomenon of same-sex couple adoption in Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
, the first Canadian province to legalize the practice.
The film represented a creative departure for Rezolution, which had previously focused on Canadian Aboriginal
Aboriginal peoples in Canada
Aboriginal peoples in Canada comprise the First Nations, Inuit and Métis. The descriptors "Indian" and "Eskimo" have fallen into disuse in Canada and are commonly considered pejorative....
film and television productions.
Story
The couple's efforts began in 2001, with one of them hoping to conceive from a sperm donor. After a year of trying unsuccessfully to become pregnant, they sought help from the fertility clinicFertility clinic
Fertility clinics are staffed medical clinics that assist couples, and sometimes individuals, who want to become parents but for medical reasons have been unable to achieve this goal via the natural course...
at the Royal Victoria Hospital, only to find that treatment was refused to lesbians. After a complaint was filed with the Quebec Human Rights Commission by another couple, the hospital changed its policy. However, despite access to fertility drugs and continued efforts at artificial insemination
Artificial insemination
Artificial insemination, or AI, is the process by which sperm is placed into the reproductive tract of a female for the purpose of impregnating the female by using means other than sexual intercourse or natural insemination...
, they were unable to conceive and their doctor suggested they adopt.
They put themselves on a local list for adoption, where the wait could be as long as 10 years, and also explored international adoption
International adoption
International adoption is a type of adoption in which an individual or couple becomes the legal and permanent parents of a child that is a national of a different country...
, only to be told that no country in the world accepted same sex couples as parents. Then they heard about a lesbian couple in Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
who had successfully adopted two children from the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. However, Quebec's provincial body that controls international adoption had only approved one U.S. adoption agency: a Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
-based Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
agency that refused to place babies with anything other than married heterosexual couples.
In spring 2006, Bainbridge and Webb noticed an advertisement in the Cree
Cree
The Cree are one of the largest groups of First Nations / Native Americans in North America, with 200,000 members living in Canada. In Canada, the major proportion of Cree live north and west of Lake Superior, in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Northwest Territories, although...
newsweekly The Nation, which they also co-own, from Batshaw Youth and Family Centres, an agency for abused and neglected children. The agency was looking for someone to adopt a Canadian Aboriginal
Aboriginal peoples in Canada
Aboriginal peoples in Canada comprise the First Nations, Inuit and Métis. The descriptors "Indian" and "Eskimo" have fallen into disuse in Canada and are commonly considered pejorative....
child. The couple learn that there is a 7-month-old boy who also has a sister on the way, both in need of a home. At the end of the film, after a long and Byzantine process, the couple have two children of their own.
Release
Mommy Mommy was screened at Reel PrideReel Pride
Reel Pride is an annual gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and two-spirit film and video festival produced by the Winnipeg Gay and Lesbian Film Society in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada....
in Winnipeg
Winnipeg
Winnipeg is the capital and largest city of Manitoba, Canada, and is the primary municipality of the Winnipeg Capital Region, with more than half of Manitoba's population. It is located near the longitudinal centre of North America, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers .The name...
and Image + Nation in Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, and had its television premiere on CBC Newsworld
CBC Newsworld
CBC News Network is a Canadian English language Category C specialty news channel owned and operated by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation . It broadcasts into over 10 million homes in Canada. It is the world's third-oldest television service of this nature, after CNN in the United States and...
on December 4, 2007. It was then screened at the Women in Film Festival in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
in March 2008 and rebroadcast on CBC for Mother's Day
Mother's Day
Mother's Day is a celebration honoring mothers and celebrating motherhood, maternal bonds, and the influence of mothers in society. It is celebrated on various days in many parts of the world, yet most commonly in March, April, or May...
.
See also
- Preacher's SonsPreacher's SonsPreacher's Sons is a 2008 American documentary film, by C. Roebuck Reed and Mark Nealey. It follows the lives of a Unitarian Universalist minister, his husband, and the five sons they adopted from the California foster care system...
- a documentary about a gay adoptive couple - The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get PregnantThe Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get PregnantThe Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant is a non-fiction book by Dan Savage. It was first published by Dutton in 1999. The book recounts the author's experiences during the process of adopting a child with his partner, Terry...