Watch The New Trailer for MOMMY

A radiant tale of courage, love and friendship, here’s your first look at director Xavier Dolan’s MOMMY.

A feisty widowed single mom finds herself burdened with the full-time custody of her unpredictable 15-year-old ADHD son. As they struggle to make ends meet, Kyla, the peculiar new neighbor across the street, offers her help. Together, they find a new sense of balance, and hope is regained.

From the director of I KILLED MY MOTHER, MOMMY stars Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Suzanne Clement, Alexandre Goyette, and Patrick Huard.

So how do Nolan’s two films differ?

“There are several parallel lines to be drawn between my first movie and Mommy. But only on the surface.”

“As far as I’m concerned, from direction to tone, acting style to visuals, those two films are two different planets. One unfolds through the eyes of a whimsical teenager, the other contemplates a mother’s hardships. Apart from the already important switch of point of view, here is why I think those two films are intrinsically dissimilar — I Killed My Mother centres on a puberty crisis, Mommy, on an existential one.”

“Moreover, there is no point for me to make the same film twice. I’m delighted by this opportunity of homecoming through these mother-and-son dynamics, as that theme has always been a part of my films. But I’m all the more delighted by the opportunity to not only attempt to explore novelty within my own filmography, but to try exploring novelty on an even larger scale, that of the family movie genre. Because it represents the most emotive form of communication with the audience.”

“The mother is where we’re from, and the child, who we are, who we’ve become. We never are truly at rest with those Freudian preoccupations, and they’re an indelible part of us.”

“Since my first film, I’ve talked a lot about love.”

“I’ve talked about teenage hood, sequestration and transsexualism. I’ve talked about Jackson Pollock and the 90s, about alienation and homophobia. Boarding schools and the very French-Canadian word “special”, milking the cows, Stendhal’s crystallization and the Stockholm syndrome. I’ve talked some pretty salty slang and I’ve talked dirty too. I’ve talked in English, every once in a while, and I’ve talked through my hat one too many times.”

“Cause that’s the thing when you “talk” about things, I guess, is that there is always this almost unavoidable risk of talking shit. Which is why I always decided to stick to what I knew, or what was -more or less – close to my skin. Subjects I thought I thoroughly or sufficiently knew because I knew my own difference or the suburb I was brought up in. Or because I knew how vast my fear of others was, and still is. Because I knew the lies we tell ourselves when we live in secret, or the useless love we stubbornly give to time thieves. These are things I’ve come close enough to to actually want to talk about them.”

“But should there be one, just one subject I’d know more than any other, one that would unconditionally inspire me, and that I love above all, it certainly would be my mother. And when I say my mother, I think I mean THE mother at large, the figure she represents.”

“Because it’s her I always come back to. It’s her I want to see winning the battle, her I want to invent problems to so she can have the credit of solving them all, her through whom I ask myself questions, her I want to hear shout out loud when we didn’t say a thing. It’s her I want to be right when we were wrong, it’s her, no matter what, who’ll have the last word.”

“Back in the days of I Killed My Mother, I felt like I wanted to punish my mom. Only five years have passed ever since, and I believe that, through Mommy, I’m now seeking her revenge. Don’t ask.”

– Xavier Dolan, May 2014

MOMMY will be in theaters January 2015