“The story is about my great-aunt. Her name is Irène,” Ellen Pollard gives the background to new documentary, Bye Mom!, featuring her close relative who is over 100 years old. Irène lives in an old people’s home together with her daughter Yvette, who is in her 60s and has a mental disability.
Irène will die one day soon. When that happens, what will become of Yvette? This is the key question asked by the film, which Pollard is co-directing with Marie De Hert and which is a Work in Progress project at CONNEXT.
Mother and daughter have been together for their whole lives. They haven’t spent a single day apart. It is therefore very hard to know how Yvette will cope.
“They’re trying to find a way to make Yvette more independent from her mother,” Pollard says of the daughter who has the mental age of a six or seven-year-old.
Pollard’s own mother used to visit the nursing home regularly and eventually started taking care of Yvette and Irène. “That’s how we came up with the story.” Pollard’s mother had realised that the two women had become very institutionalised. They rarely went outside and had no independence. She wanted them to have more freedom and for Yvette to become self-reliant.
On paper, as Pollard acknowledges, this might sound like a “heavy” story about mental and physical infirmity and the ravages of age. The director, though, is quick to point out that there is plenty of humour here. “It’s also a really funny story in how they interact, how they talk to the camera.” Yvette gradually emerges in a heroic light.
Although Irène and Yvette are her close relatives, the director didn’t know them well before starting the documentary. They would occasionally be at the same big family gatherings together (“with tons of people whose names I didn’t know” as the filmmaker puts it). Now, through the film, they’ve become very close. Pollard acknowledges that it will be devastatingly sad when Irène dies.
As for working with her own mum, that has been very straightforward. “I can just command her in a daughter-mother way. She loves me to the end, so I can say whatever I want to her,” says Pollard.
The film is a work-in-progress. The filmmakers are currently in the editing phase and are looking for broadcaster and sales agent support in Antwerp while also targeting international festivals and platforms. The project is produced by Borgerhoff & Lamberigts and Antwerp-based Poolhert Productions (the outfit which De Hert and Pollard run together).
The directors haven’t rushed the documentary. “We felt we needed some time to pass to see some evolution in our characters, both the mother who is getting worse in her health and the daughter who is getting more independent and more strong. That’s why we’ve been filming for three years.”
The two directors are firm friends. “We complement each other. Seamless. Like well pasted wallpaper,” they write of one another on their company website.
They’ve known each other for a long time. “I could handle the camera bit. She [De Hert] did film studies,” Pollard explains why they first went into business together. “We are very lucky because we know this wouldn’t have worked with every friend.” It seems that the directors now have a near telepathic relationship. “We don’t even have to talk to each other anymore. We just feel what the other is thinking. It’s a weird sensation but it’s very handy! And we care about each other’s feelings.”
The Antwerp-based duo have made various shorts, among them Bomma & Maurits, which is about how Marie’s grandmother found love through the internet; The Last Dance, set in an Amsterdam day centre for people with intellectual disabilities, and Happy Together, about pensioners working to help refugees.
“Sometimes I come up with a story, sometimes she does,” Pollard notes of how they share the creative burden. “We try to see stories in people we feel are a bit under-represented…”
Other filmmakers may “talk about” refugees or people with disabilities or old age pensioners but, Pollard suggests, “the story never comes from them,” notes Pollard. She and De Hert always try to take the point of view of their subjects and to see the world through their eyes.
On Bye Mom!, one of the biggest challenges was that neither protagonist had good hearing. “We can’t ask them to repeat something. We can’t ask them to do something for us. We are just following them…we can’t really connect to them because their hearing is so bad. That is also a big part of the film, how they don’t understand us, how my [own] mum tries to find a way to improve their hearing.”
The film is now close to completion but there is still some shooting to be done. The filmmakers are keen to show how Irène and Yvette are regarded by the people around them, for example the nurses who look after them every day.
Pollard and De Hert have a clear sense of how they want their careers to progress – and the bottom line isn’t the priority. “We don’t really care about getting rich from our production company. That’s a really important reason why we work together so well…”
The two directors are now preparing their first fiction series, for VRT MAX, about a couple becoming parents for the first time. This is subject matter of which Pollard will soon have first-hand knowledge as she herself is due to have a baby early next year, an event which will mean a break from the filmmaking. But she aims to be back working by the late summer and there are plenty of other projects on the boil…
