‘Mada’ is a generational love story that holds a silently painful crisis of faith

Third Horizon Film Festival 2021 – Mada leans heavily on cultural subtext to tell the story of two trying mothers raising a young boy.

London-born Jamaican filmmaker Joseph Douglas-Elmhirst tells stories exploring his Jamaican cultural identity, borrowing from voices of the women in his family. His short film Mada promises to unfold the conflicting natures of two mothers, a generation apart, and their approach to expressing love and protection.

As conflicts go, the push and pull between Faith (Asoya Smith) and her mother Ethel (Brenda Farmer) doesn’t come with the explosive fireworks that you can witness in Jamaican society every day. Instead, it’s a slow silent burn that amplifies the isolation Faith, her son Luther (Xavier Alexander Keating), and Ethel face in their rural reality.

Ethel is convinced that the doll Luther plays with is an early indicator of his sexuality. The thought alone of her grandson diverging from a heterosexual norm shatters her religious security and sends her on a campaign to get Faith, and God, to set him on the straight path.

Her outrage fizzles as what becomes more apparent is that this family is lonely. Faith works as a cleaner with a group of women in Port Antonio, Portland – but spends most of her time quietly working, sometimes away from the group of older women. Besides a conversation with a neighbor, Franklyn, Faith doesn’t speak much. Luther and Ethel also spend a lot of time in solitude, magnified by the vast backdrops of the Portland landscape.

“My hope was to explore the conflicts that can arise from within a postcolonial matriarchal culture, where women often live and work within physical and emotional cycles of monotony and repetition”, Douglas-Elmhirst writes in his director statement. Religion holding firm as the strongest remnant of colonialism in Jamaica, there is no space for modern parenting. Ethel never considered that if Luther was queer, switching his doll for a truck wouldn’t change that. Some truths we hold for ourselves in the name of culture and religion defy logic, yes?

The intended or unintended consequence of Ethel’s criticisms is Faith questioning her value as a mother. “Mada is my love letter to the complex nature of the women I grew up admiring and observing, in awe of their gallantry, beauty, and rhythm; to the culture to which this story belongs; and to the boys who will struggle to survive within it”, says Douglas-Elmhirst. Getting the reassurance that she needs, Faith goes on to live another day.

Mada was screened virtually at the 2021 Third Horizon Film Festival.