“I was most bruised by the people who wanted me silent.”

In a new documentary about her life, lesbian Jamaican poet and memorist Staceyann Chin is anything but silent. She is loud and unafraid to tackle the difficult parts of her history, which include abandonment, violence, her sexuality and, most importantly, motherhood, from both her perspective as a mother and a daughter.

A Mother Apart digs into Chin’s relationship with her mother Hazel, who abandoned Chin multiple times in her childhood. After promising to return within weeks when Chin was nine, Hazel disappeared. It would be years before she was found.

“I suppose I only set out to tell my story,” Chin tells me ahead of the documentary’s premiere on PBS. “But you can’t tell your story without telling your family’s story.”

“It’s even more complicated because I’m a memoir writer,” she continues. “But I’d like to think I’ve done my best to make sure my mother is portrayed in a fair light, in a true light.”

I believe she more than excels at what she was trying to do in telling her story.

Throughout the film, which took about six years to make, Chin goes around the world to piece together who Hazel was and what would have pushed her to abandon Chin and her older brother. First, she finds herself in Montreal, where she and her daughter Zuri travel to the home her mother lived in for many years when Chin was a child.

During the trip, they speak with neighbors who have nothing but fond memories of Hazel. At the same time, they are shocked to learn Staceyann was not the child they had briefly met. In fact, they didn’t even know Hazel had two children she had left behind in Jamaica. Despite the shock, they assured Chin that this sudden revelation didn’t change the way they felt about Hazel. She obviously felt their sentiment horrifying and frustrating.

Chin exploration of her mother’s past is frequently cut with scenes of her on stages around the world performing her poetry, much of it grappling with her abandonment and feminism. She is a fierce and fiery performer and writer. Strike that, she is a fierce and fiery person; everything about her explodes out of her pores.

While much of the first hour of the film rightfully treats Hazel as a ghost whose memory exists solely to taunt the daughter she left behind, she becomes an alarmingly real presence in the latter portion of the film. In her twenties, she found her mother living in Germany and learned she had a little sister, who has an equally fraught relationship with their mother despite being “raised” by her. The relationship between the sisters is deep.

Hazel in the present does finally appear when Staceyann travels to Germany after Covid restrictions are lifted. Neither sister has communicated with their mother since the pandemic began, but that doesn’t keep the older sister from trying.

“I keep people; I’m a people keeper,” Chin tells her mother and sister over lunch. It’s the reason she continues to make an effort to maintain a relationship with her mother, even though the older woman seems reluctant at best to live up to her end of the deal.

“I will always do the work to hold onto you,” Chin states firmly.

When Hazel finally appears on-screen, I didn’t realize how desperate I was to actually see her and hear her voice. Once she’s given the space to tell her side of the story, I had to reconcile the woman on screen with the same one I knew inflicted constant cruelty on her children. Chin and filmmaker Laurie Townshend do an amazing job never painting Hazel as a hero or a villain. She’s just a woman who made certain choices.

Hazel’s participation in the film is fascinating. Not everyone would be so willing to show up, knowing how their decisions would likely be perceived. “[Hazel was] owed the opportunity to respond to my stories about her,” Chin tells me. “And I think she did a hell of a job.”

In the final half hour of the film, Chin watches the interview with her mother while the director films her. After pausing, she reveals she has never asked her mother why she left directly but explains she knows why her mother left her: Her choices were to languish in poverty for the rest of her life or start over and have a better life someplace else with someone new.

Chin has a “deep empathy” for her mother. However, the young girl in her cannot fully forgive Hazel for leaving. It is a wound that is far too deep, no matter how much she can empathize with her mother’s choices. She explains her mother may not be dealing with the same kind of “deep loneliness” she was if she hadn’t abandoned or mistreated her children.

“Why do you keep coming back for her?” the director asks. “I don’t come for her,” Chin replies. “I come because it is the decent thing to do.”

“It’s a kindness I can offer her,” she continues. “It’s also a kindness I can offer myself.”

As the film ends, Chin says, “I think the more you understand about the process of mothering, the more grace you can extend to the mothers who perhaps mothered you in ways that might have bruised you.” The final shot is of her and her daughter Zuri on a hill, the sun high in the sky between them.

Throughout A Mother Apart, we get these lovely little nuggets of Chin’s relationship to her growing daughter. Through old social media videos and current conversations the two have, we’re able to piece together the deep love they have for each other. It was her relationship with her daughter that I was most interested in when we talked.

“There was a sense that the only way I was going to experience motherhood, the mother/daughter relationship, was if I became the mother,” Chin explains.

Staceyann Chin is a single mother by choice. She touches on Zuri’s origins in the documentary, where she explains even though she was an out lesbian, she married a gay poet named Peter. Together, they believed they were going to be pioneers of the new “modern family,” she tells me.

Peter got cancer and died before they could make their modern family dream a reality. What came next was nearly ten years of clawing uphill. It wasn’t easy for a single lesbian (her sexuality is always a matter of fact, never a source of contention in the documentary) to procure sperm in the late aughts, and it was even harder to find Black sperm. “Your standards start very high,” she jokes. “And then you realize you don’t really have much choice.”

Chin describes her once “feral” need to get pregnant with a touch of humor. It was so strong, she considered propositioning men in airplane bathrooms to get her pregnant just because she liked their teeth. However, everything changed when Peter’s brother CJ entered the picture, offering his sperm. And with that, the original dream she had longed for came true.

Zuri has a relationship with her father and his family, which is beautiful, but not without sorrow for Chin. “You grow up and you thrash about what your parents didn’t do and what your mother fell down on and how she failed you,” she says of her feelings. “And then by the time you have your own kid you’re like ‘oh my god.’ There are some things that she might need that I absolutely can’t provide. And I’ve worn the sorrow of that. That has made it easier for me to see my mother’s failings as limitations that she had no control over.”

Over the course of the film, Zuri goes from first grader to tween, which is quite a time period to cover. “My daughter is young, so she’s for the most part happy to be a part of the project,” Chin says. “She’s proud of who she is and who I am. Time will tell if she remains that way. I have tried to let her know that there is room for her to disagree. This story is true for me. But it could be entirely different if she decides to share her story when that time comes.”

A Mother Apart will be available to stream free through PBS until the end of October.

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Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.

A couple weeks from now, a variety of artists will perform at the 2025 All Things Go music festival just outside DC and at a concurrent festival in New York. This year’s lineup includes Doechii, Lucy Dacus, Joy Oladokun, Clairo, and Kesha. In recent years, the festival has been affectionately dubbed Gaychella and Lesbopalooza, monikers that incite enthusiasm in the communities they represent. But almost 30 years ago, another lineup of artists was called Lesbopalooza in a different tone. When critics and industry insiders and random men who didn’t attend called Lilith Fair that same name, they did so with derision as a way to further ostracize and belittle its collection of female artists.

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, Ally Pankiw’s new documentary about Lilith Fair, begins in the present. It shows us young people on TikTok discussing or discovering this moment in recent music history. Then it cuts to Olivia Rodrigo talking about the importance of Lilith Fair and the influence of those artists on her own work. At first, it seems the documentary is trying to appeal to Gen Z first and foremost, as if its primary goal is to teach young people rather than be for those who already care about Lilith Fair, including attendees. Luckily, this isn’t the case. Bookending the film in the present instead functions as a way to underline the influence of those three years of music tours. There would be no Lesbopalooza (positive) without Lesbopalooza (negative).

Using a mix of archival footage and contemporary interviews — as well as some spoken excerpts from Sarah McLachlan’s tour diary — the film creates a portrait of Lilith Fair and the culture it fought against. It illustrates the sexism of the 90s music industry and shows how McLachlan refused its boundaries. First, she invites Paula Cole to be her opening act despite the industry standard that two women can’t be on the same bill. When that’s a success, she begins to imagine something bigger.

As someone born in 1993, I did not attend Lilith Fair, but I’ve long romanticized it. This film feeds into that romance. From the opening night at The Gorge to Indigo Girls creating camaraderie among the acts to the surprise success that became undeniable, the archival footage — of performances, of fans gushing — allows those of us who weren’t there a little taste of the magic. It also shows the power of the shows beyond their lineups: the money raised for charities, the focus on having women crew, and even the insistence of giving all the crew healthcare.

It also displays the cost of this rebellion. Like the wonderful Indigo Girls documentary from a couple years ago, It’s Only Life After All, we’re shown how quickly Lilith Fair and its associated acts became an easy punchline. Both that documentary and this one reveal how the jokes weren’t a lighthearted jest but a more sinister reinforcement of sexism and homophobia.

One of my favorite parts of the documentary invites music journalist Ann Powers to respond to the complaint that it was women critics who were harshest, women critics who seemed to always be discovering “women musicians” anew. Powers notes that she was often writing the pieces her male colleagues and bosses assigned her. The sexism of the music industry didn’t just impact the artists — it was also experienced by the women writing about them.

By the end of Lilith Fair’s three years, the exhaustion of everyone involved — especially McLachlan — is deeply felt. It was a resounding success and yet the ambitious tours combined with the cultural backlash including bomb threats from anti-abortion groups made it taxing. The final conclusion is a hopeful one: these tours had a greater impact than McLachlan and her collaborators could ever have imagined at the time. It also leaves room for a different, less simplistic kind of hope. Like the angry young white men at Woodstock ‘99 and the media eager to tear women down, many of society’s worst impulses continue on. But anyone can take up the mantle of Lilith Fair, to refuse discriminating practices and push to make our world a little better. We can work together and view our successes as intertwined rather than in competition. We can gather and make a new world, even if it only lasts a few years, a summer, a night.

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery will be available to stream on Hulu and Disney+ starting September 21.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

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