Screening of Mommy by Xavier Dolan with lecture by Quebecois Film Scholar Mercedes Baillargeon

Movie Screening with introduction and Q+ A at Fed Ex Global Center

Mercedes is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and scholar on Quebecois film with publications on third wave feminism.

Her current research explores the question of (post)nationalism in “Québécois” cinema of the new millennium. Her research mainly focuses on the aesthetics, ethics and politics of 20th and 21st-century first-person narrative, the intersection between public/private spaces and discourses, and the (de)construction of personal and/or collective identities.

Her presentation explores the complicated and conflicting emotions that tie the characters of Dolan’s film together to create an improbable “family” that ultimately  proposes a new arrangement of queer affect and relationality that underscores the contradictory and impossible tensions between a mother and her son, as well as their unconditional love for each other, despite it all.