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(New York Jewish Week) — The “stuff” within the title of Judith Helfand’s new documentary, “Love & Stuff,” is supposed to be taken (largely) actually. We’re speaking pictures, nail clippers, sneakers, gloves, a mah jongg set, a piano, takeout menus, low-fat cookbooks, false enamel, candlesticks, kiddush cups and elephant collectible figurines — heaps and many elephant collectible figurines.
That is the stuff Helfand’s mom Florence left behind when she died of metastatic colon most cancers in 2013, and which her middle-aged daughter can’t bear to throw away. In her unflinching and sometimes hilarious movie, which makes its nationwide broadcast premiere on PBS’s “POV” sequence on Monday, Helfand reveals the containers and containers of her mom’s stuff that fill her (modest) Higher West Facet condo. “They nonetheless held traces of my mother’s DNA,” Helfand explains within the movie. “And it was exactly the ‘Mother’-ishness of them that made it not possible for me to throw them away.”
“Love & Stuff” is an essay on the artwork and ache of letting go, created by a filmmaker with a bent to reside her life out loud. Twenty-five years in the past “POV” aired “A Wholesome Child Lady,” Helfand’s documentary about her personal battle, at age 25, with most cancers attributable to DES, a drug prescribed to her mom throughout being pregnant. The house films she shot for that movie are repurposed right here, as she strikes forwards and backwards amongst reminiscences of her mom, the sickness that killed her, and Helfand’s adoption — when she was near 50 — of her personal child woman.
“I’ve been making first-person movies that discover kind of necessary common subjects however via a really private middle-class, Jewish, heimish lens since 1990,” Helfand instructed me in an interview Thursday, utilizing the Yiddish phrase for intimate and homey. The common subjects on this case are serving to a beloved one towards a “good dying,” coping with grief and studying to embrace a future regardless of the specter of inevitable loss. The movie is a “highway map,” mentioned Helfand, for “when the entire world turns the wrong way up.”
I’d by no means met Helfand, however immediately associated to her and her world. We’re about the identical age, and grew up a city aside on Lengthy Island. Her Higher West Facet milieu is so acquainted to me (she attends Romemu, the favored Jewish Renewal congregation) that I wasn’t shocked when a superb pal of mine reveals up within the movie to offer her recommendation on clearing house for her new child.
A nonetheless from “Love & Stuff,” displaying Judith Helfand’s mom’s assortment of elephant collectible figurines. (PBS)
The movie can also be a tribute to the sorts of intimate communities that I’ve come to think about as “unintended households,” and affiliate with the synagogues I’ve belonged to. All through the movie and her many life modifications, Helfand seems to be surrounded by useful, caring buddies. They provide recommendation, sensible assist and difficult love. Helfand instructed me that her late father requested her to vow that she would be part of a synagogue “since you don’t need to have to supply your individual shiva.” Macabre recommendation, perhaps, however to me a profound assertion about what it means to be a part of a group.
A PBS information launch describes Helfand’s “heimish gallows humor,” and that additionally strikes me as good. Early within the movie, quickly after her mom dies, Helfand describes shiva as “per week surrounded by family members and buddies … comforting, exhausting and punctuated by babka.” The digicam lingers on the piles of pastry dropped off by guests. “Each night time that week, round 4 a.m., I woke as much as grief,” says Helfand, whose struggles to regulate her weight are an necessary a part of the movie. “The sort that will get you away from bed and leads you to the kitchen praying to not break into the babka. She’s not within the babka. Step away from the babka.”
Most of all, I associated to Helfand’s struggles with stuff. I’ve a pile of my late father’s belongings in my basement, in an space I name — stealing a phrase from the author Ian Frazier — the “dad museum.” There’s a giant bag of my late mother-in-law’s medicines in my spouse’s residence workplace. And currently I’ve been my very own junk and imagining my poor youngsters having to undergo it at some point. In her definitive graphic memoir about her mother and father’ final days, “Can’t We Speak About One thing Extra Nice?”, cartoonist Roz Chast passes on this little bit of sage recommendation for anybody contemplating downsizing: “If you happen to don’t assume your youngsters are going to need it, don’t take it.”
In fact, it’s not nearly stuff — because the title of Helfand’s documentary makes clear, it is usually about love. Her neologism “Mother-ishness” is canny: It’s a play on “mamash,” Helfand instructed me, a phrase in Hebrew and Yiddish that may imply “truly” or “actually,” however at root means “substance” and even “actuality.” It’s arduous to let go of your mother and father’ tchotchkes not as a result of they might be value one thing, however as a result of they specific who they had been and the lives they lived.
And but shifting on additionally means letting go of the bodily actuality of these we cherish. “Love & Stuff” is about discovering a spot the place they will reside within us, and never simply in our closets and basements. As Helfand places it, “She’s not within the babka.”
“Love & Stuff” premieres on “POV” Monday, Sept. 5 (test native listings) and is obtainable to stream via Nov. 5 at pbs.org, and the PBS Video app. On Sept. 14 at 7 p.m., there will probably be a reside screening on the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, adopted by a Q&A with the director. Click on right here to buy tickets.
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