Films That Celebrate Maternal Instinct In All Its Complexity
May 07, 2021, 15:29 IST
Mothering comes with its own challenges and these films acknowledge that reality.
May 9 is Mother's Day and though the mother figure in Bollywood is usually one dimensional, these four films will help you dig deeper into the lesser-explored aspects of the maternal instinct.
1. Hamid
This Yoodlee film is not a saccharine tribute to motherhood but paints an unlikely protagonist that has not been seen often in mainstream cinema. A grieving Kashmiri woman repeatedly visits police stations to get some information about her missing husband while her young son finds ways to comfort himself to cope with an unspeakable tragedy. In this Aijaz Khan directorial, Rasika Dugal plays the devastated mother with great sensitivity while Talha Arshad Reshi plays Hamid in a National Award-winning performance. Their relationship is tender, frail and even fraught with an occasional sense of desperation. But eventually what brings this mother-son relationship alive is the hope she imparts to him. Stories about grief and resilience often paint women to be superhuman heroines in cinema but in this film, the mother is human. Her pain is overwhelming and real. It sums up all the news stories that we are too busy to read and humanises a loss we are not familiar with. The sight of seven-year-old Hamid dialling 786 to speak to God so that his family can be healed is heart-breaking but also shows that a child who has been loved will never lose hope.