After having watched and Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project on the very fancy SF Int'l Film Fest screener DVD machines this afternoon, we're thinking the theme of the afternoon was family obligations. (This is as good a reminder as any to get a Mother's Day present for next week, folks!)

Key of G, a local film, is a portrait of a 22-year-old Mission resident named Gannet with a very rare form of mental retardation known as Mowat-Wilson syndrome, which renders him unable to communicate verbally and unable to care for himself. Gannet's mother is encouraging him to move out of her house and into an apartment down the street with three full-time caregivers, and to learn to live semi-independently of her. The movie is primarily a portrait of Gannet's daily life and his love of sound, but we found ourselves also thinking about his mother's obligation to him -- there's certainly a dignity to giving him his independence, but there's also a certain amount of dismay it creates in us as an observer as well.

The same idea of dignity and dismay came up for us in Tierney Gearon as well, which follows photographer artist Tierney Gearon in her photo shoots of her children in emotionally-fraught settings for outsiders (peeing, crying, sexualized), as well as with her mentally-unstable mother in even more emotionally-fraught settings (Tierney naked and curled up in her mother's lap, Tierney's mother in a breast-feeding pose with Tierney's newborn, Tierney's mother in a paranoid schizophrenic spell). The pictures are beautiful and clearly made with love -- but what does it mean when your child starts crying in rage and pain and you say "wait, wait, let me take a picture"? What obligations does motherhood create -- if any?

Tierney Gearon will show one more time on Wed. at 12:45, and then it's moving to the Sundance Channel. Key of G is no longer showing.

Picture (one of the less provocative) above by Tierney Gearon.

Key of G