Premiering in the Toronto International Film Festival’s 2024 Centrepiece program, filmmaker Johnny Ma’s (Oldstone, 2016, To Live to Sing, 2019), latest film The Mother and the Bear is a cosmic fairytale, but not quite, exploration of what it means for a mother and widow to rediscover her femininity and personhood as a woman, as she discovers who her daughter is following an accident.
Veteran South Korean actress Kim Ho-jung (Queenmaker, 2023, A French Woman, 2022) plays Sara, a widow from Seoul who rushes to the snow covered city of Winnipeg, Canada after receiving the call that her daughter Su-mi (Leere Park) has fallen into a coma after an accident. As she spends time in Su-mi’s apartment looking through the signs of a life removed from what she believes of her daughter, Sara herself realises that she herself has turned into a woman she stopped recognizing years ago.
Sarah, believing that what Su-mi needs to have in her is a husband to be complete, she embarks on a personal quest to find a potential son-in-law. Which is much harder than she anticipated in a new city and era she doesn’t understand, but is perhaps just what she needs to learn about who she can be.
In my interview with Johnny, we discuss his real life inspiration for Sarah, the film’s fairytale elements and ties to Korean and East Asian folklore, and what made Kim Ho-jung perfect to play the character of Sarah.
Carolyn Hinds
Freelance Film Critic, Journalist, Podcaster & YouTuber
African American Film Critics Association Member, Tomatometer-Approved Critic
Host & Producer Carolyn Talks…, and So Here’s What Happened! Podcast
Bylines at http://Authory.com/CarolynHinds
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