To Leave With You

To Leave with You is a documentary journey between mother and son, examining the reverberations of four years of intimate partner violence over the following fifty years. In 1967, my mother was drawn to a highly intelligent and compelling figure: an apparent revolutionary, invested in social change, who came to Canada as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Against this backdrop of profound tumult and resistance against larger forces, my mother found herself winded by the realization that she had married a violent man, and was now pregnant by him. The film witnesses key moments of her attempts at departure, how others assisted or hindered, and how leaving was finally possible. This documentary project was structured to examine how closely collaborative methods of filming impact the final project, and the entwined praxis of biographical and autobiographical modes of storytelling, inherent to point-of-view films on family.