5 Recent, Sensitively Made Mother Daughter Movies To Watch This Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is always on a Sunday – catch up with your moms today with some wonderful, sensitively made, not-so-stereotypical mother daughter movies, from this decade.

Happy Mother’s Day to all our readers! Here are my personal favourites among some very well made mother daughter movies from this past decade, that show the relationship in all its forms – mothers and daughters unplugged.

Listen… Amaya!

A widowed mother who owns a book cafe, her adult daughter who’s a budding writer, and an erudite professional photographer who enters their life. The mother, played by Deepti Naval, finds a friend in the photographer played by Farookh Shaikh, and even the daughter Amaya, played by Swara Bhaskar, plans a coffee table book with him. Everything goes well till things blow up – the adult daughter realises that her mother and her work partner are more than just friends.

The movie tackles some hard questions and sensitive relationships. Does it deliver? An eminently watchable film for the excellent acting by the Chashme Baddoor pair and the talented Swara Bhaskar.

Nil Battey Sannata

Swara Bhaskar dazzles again, this time as the mother. A domestic help, she has big dreams for her daughter Apeksha, who isn’t keen on her studies because ‘anyway she will also become a bai like her mother’. But Chanda, her mom, doesn’t give up. When Apu (Apeksha) taunts her about doing the 10th herself, she joins her school as a student, and takes the help of her classmates.

What happens next is worth watching in the film itself, an ode to the mother daughter relationship.

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Margarita With a Straw

Kalki Koechlin’s Laila is a fine example of her acting skills. A teenager with cerebral palsy, she moves to the US for further education, with her mother, played by Revathi. Here, she discovers that she is bisexual. Through it all, she is cared for by her mother, and later, she, in turn, is cared for by Laila when diagnosed with cancer.

Having worked with children affected by cerebral palsy as a volunteer at a special school for a few years, I was struck by how ‘real’ the dynamics between Laila and her mother were. The obvious love, the caring, the little things that are done through long habit, the frustrations, the anger, the loud tantrums, the distress… everything. Revathi, of course, is one of our finest actors, not given the recognition she should be.

Secret Superstar

This is a completely mother-daughter movie in my opinion. While the premise ostensibly is about Insia, played by Zaira Wasim, achieving her dreams of being a famous singer, the parallel story line of her trying to get justice for her mother who is in a domestically violent marriage, is heartwarming. A mother who tries to shield her kids as much as she can from a bullying husband and father, who understands their dreams and aspirations and encourages them in any little way she can.

Search for images for this film, and you’ll end up with a lot of mother daughter ones!

Aamhi Doghi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g0nT1gzgl8

This is a Marathi movie, not very well known to the Hindi film watching crowd, but I’ll like to add it to this list – for those interested in watching it, it’s available on Prime, with English subtitles.

A teenage, only daughter of a high profile lawyer dad in a semi-rural part of Maharashtra, hard-headed, unemotional, feminist Savitri grows up without a mom, in a house full of domestic helpers, but no relatives, as the dad is always out for some case or the other. One fine day, the father lands up home after a couple of months fighting a case in another town, with a young wife Amala in tow, just a few years older than Savitri, a very traditional, unlettered woman.

‘Aamhi Doghi’ literally means ‘we two’ in the feminine. The premise of the movie now set, one wonders where it will go. But this is a brilliantly portrayed narrative that is unpeeled slowly, revealing facets to the minds of both the lead characters, and the delicate mother-daughter bond that forms.

Do look up these mother daughter movies, and have a happy Mother’s Day.

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