Black Mothers Love & Resist is a documentary about the growing number of black women who have lost their children to police brutality and have coalesced into the common, yet, politically powerful trope of black maternal grief and loss.
Debora Souza Silva, the director of the documentary film, stated in an interview with the Winter Film Awards International Film Festival that “the story never left me. I just kept thinking, I need to produce a bigger film. That’s how the idea of Black Mothers Love & Resist was born.”
The documentary film follows Wanda Johnson and Angela Williams, mothers of young Black men victimized by police brutality, who come together and build a network of community-led support, mutual aid and healing. Long before George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Oscar Grant’s 2009 fateful encounter with law enforcement on a BART platform seeded public awareness and cultural consciousness of systematic racism and its discontents. Paying forward lessons learned and advocating against anti-Black violence in memory of her son, Oscar, Wanda Johnson holds space for Angela Williams, whose teen son Ulysses, survives a police encounter in Troy, Alabama, living to tell his story. Radical empathy fuels this timely exposé.
The description of Debora Souza Silva’s Black Mothers Love & Resist chronicles the history of racism and the ripple effect of hatred capturing truth, life and reality. The director approaches this sensitive subject with righteous fury and deep intelligence using interviews, slow-speed editing, home videos and archival imagery to fashion a vibrant shout. The film jumps from point to point which is designed to drive the message home with the force of a blow; police brutality against Black children must come to a stop. The strength of this film is its heart.
This film is an example of the transformative power of filmmaking. When we see Angela Williams, Tamyra Smith Davis, Barbara Jackson, Sheila Banks and other grieving Black mothers, we see Wanda Johnson right next to them. She makes space for these women to share their stories while demonstrating empathy as another grieving Black mother. The love and support shared among these grieving Black mothers keeps them going. They come together in support groups, take time to pray together, do each other’s make-up and organize small parties to forget their pain. To lose a child is very painful to a woman, but to be in this film took strength, tenacity and grace. It is a strength we continue to see as we watch these Black women relive their stories in each interview.
In this documentary feature film, the mothers not only lament for their children, but for the potential dangers that befall other mothers whose children remain unsafe from police brutality. They choose to become mothers of the community, and their collective identity and emotional connection extend to a broader reach.
Black Mothers Love & Resist pays homage to all the Black mothers across the United States who have lost their children to police brutality.
