Mothers and daughters
Talking to filmmaker Heather Watson-Burgess
KERRI WOLOSZYN STAFF
In Heather Watson-Burgess’ directorial debut, At My Mother’s Breast, the Winnipeg filmmaker uses her own life and family as an exploration into the world of mothers and daughters dealing with the profound changes that occur after a breast cancer diagnosis. Watson- Burgess sat down with the Manitoban to talk about her deeply personal film and how it has affected her life and her family.
The Manitoban: This is your directorial debut, so can you talk about the process of making the film?
Heather Watson-Burgess: I approached the National Film Board as a complete sort of unknown quantity. And I sort of phoned up their front desk and I’m like, “I have this idea and, like, what do I do?” And so they passed me onto the producer there who met with me and he was interested in the idea but needed to sort of suss me out a little bit and he’d asked around a little bit in the community, you know, “Have you heard of this Heather lady? Is she crazy?” But it was a very long process with the Film Board. When I first went to them [the film] wasn’t going to be about my family, it wasn’t going to be about me, it was a totally different vision.
M: What was the point when you decided that this movie was going to be about you and your family?
WB: The original idea was going to be just to follow a mother and daughter through the first year after a diagnosis. And then I ran into a bunch of ethical concerns. I went to a psycho-social oncologist and started to say, “If I’m going to do this what are some of the issues I need to be anticipating for my subjects?” And she said, “You know, I don’t know how you’d get informed consent because they don’t know what it’s like to be a breast cancer patient, they don’t know what it’s like to be in a documentary.” And so, you know, that was a bit of a quandary. And so then I thought I’ll take a bunch of mothers and daughters at different stages along the way and sort of piece that together. Then I thought, there’s an awful lot of them. And it sort of seemed silly to go outside the circle that I was already a part of [ . . . ] A part of what made the decision was that my family were all like, “OK.”
M: Seeing that there is so much history of breast cancer in your family, was it a subject that you wanted to tackle for a long time through the medium of film?
WB: Not for a long time, like, it wasn’t my cause in that kind of a way. It just sort of struck me one day how much it was wrapped up in my own identity. What really started it was that I had to write a bio for work and the first sentence is always like, “Heather Watson-Burgess is a mother of two,” and the phrase that popped into my head is that “I’m a daughter of a woman with breast cancer, who is a daughter of a woman with breast cancer, who is a daughter of a woman with breast cancer.” And that’s, like, a bit demented, you know, that that should be a part of who I am. So, I thought, that needs to be explored.
M: The film seems to explore the nature of familial bonds. Do you think that these bonds were strengthened throughout the process of making the film?
WB: They were strengthened kind of like your bones get stronger when you break them. It was such an intense process. I mean, it’s hard to make a documentary in the most ideal circumstances and juggle everything correctly. But because my aunt was dying, that sort of just raised the stakes for everybody. The real tricky part was sort of deciding when to be which role at which time. And there were times when I guessed wrong.
M: Where do you think that men fit within the world of the film?
WB: You know, that was really a hard decision. The way that breast cancer affects a woman is huge. It goes out in this big web because it affects their relationships within their family and in their romantic life. It was too much to take on all the sort of channels and there are already great documentaries about what it’s like to have breast cancer at that first diagnosis and there are materials out there about the medical stuff. There needs to be a film made about what it does to men and the husbands and brothers and sons and fathers. It deserves its own feature -length film and it needs to be made by someone who can bring something more to it than guess work. So, I really feel like it’s a story that needs to be told, but it’s not mine to tell.
M: The film seems like an exploration of self as much as it is an exploration of family. What did you learn about yourself while making the film?
WB: It’s such a strange thing seeing yourself from the outside. I mean, I learned all kinds of useless things like: I have a really dumb listening face, I don’t look like I’m listening at all, it’s terrible; I let my roots grow too long; I learned which jeans to stop wearing. I could see so much more clearly where I was hiding from myself, where I was hiding from certain issues and how I was robbing myself of connections that were so valuable by being too protected. And, you know, I was so busy trying to protect my mom from any negative feelings that I had that I was preventing her from connecting with me.
M: What do you have to say to other people who might be going through a similar situation?
WB: In terms of families that have a lot of breast cancer in it and stuff, hereditary breast cancer is the least common kind, it’s only about seven per cent. But there is a really big distance, even if you do have the genetic predisposition, there are so many other things that have to happen first between having the bad gene and getting the disease. And the distance between those two things, there’s a lot of room for hope.
At My Mother’s Breast screens at Cinematheque at 7 p.m. from Oct. 23- 26. Watson-Burgess and her mother will be doing a Q-and-A at the Oct. 23 screening.
