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This review of Your Mum and Dad, a profoundly moving film, examines the intergenerational transmission of trauma through two stories and their respective healing using psychoanalysis and art, respectively. The first story brings us into the clinic as we observe an interracial analysis of a Jewish man whose mother lost her family in the Holocaust. The second is the filmmaker's story whose parents maintained a 50-year silence over the death of her sister who drowned at the age of 4. The film artistically demonstrates how the search for truth is both painful and liberating.
This film is framed by the poem “This Be The Verse,” by the late British poet, Philip Larkin:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.They may not mean to, but they do.They fill you with the faults they hadAnd add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turnBy fools in old-style hats and coats,Who half the time were soppy-sternAnd half at one another's throats.