Twice a week I reach out to my mother in New Jersey to see how she is doing. I am recording her as a way to document our conversations and reflect on our relationship. Sitting hundreds of miles away, I often thought how I would move away and wouldn’t miss home. When I moved for graduate school in 2018, I was optimistic to start a new chapter for myself. But as the months passed, I became increasingly homesick. I missed my mother, my home, and my state more than I had expected. While our relationship has often been complicated, I found myself realizing how fierce of an attachment I had with her. My parents and I moved into the Pine Brook Motel when I was three years old. We were only supposed to be there for a short time, but a couple of months turned into years and it became evident that this was our home. While my father worked six days out of the week to provide for our household, my mother was a stay-at-home mom. She was a constant presence in my life, but also a passive individual in this space. My childhood and formative years as a teenager were spent in a place that was transient and volatile. Looking at a family album from our time in the motel, I found difficulty in seeing any period of happiness. Joyful moments became too ephemeral for my memory to hang on to, even when staring at a photograph of myself or my mother posing for the camera. We finally moved out in 2007, a couple of weeks before my seventeenth birthday, into an apartment four miles away where I lived until 2015.
On my trips home to visit during holidays and summer break, I would record my mother, her space, and her objects within her home. During these last several months of the Covid-19 pandemic quarantine, I went through the videos trying to make sense of what I captured. By documenting and conversing with my mother in her space, I hoped to find an understanding of who she was and who she has become. The collective narrative I found is multi layered. It is about my mother, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia who moved to Germany in the 1970’s, and our shared experience of living in a motel for thirteen years when she first came to America in 1990. I found many questions, but there was one that was ever present. What does it mean when you can’t go home again?
Leave Nothing Behind is a documentary film that is deeper than a narrative of my mother’s life, the motel, and our relationship. The film exhibits the schisms and failures of the American dream, a hopeful vision that evidently turns into disappointment. It expresses the condemnation of women in systems, and patriarchal constructs that leave no room for us to progress and thrive. It illustrates the intimate and visceral relationship of mother and daughter within the family structure, while considering the notions of resignation and conflict.
Anna Schwiederek
Stephanie Schwiederek
Director: Stephanie Schwiederek
Writer: Stephanie Schwiederek
Producer: Stephanie Schwiederek
Editors: Stephanie Schwiederek, Dennis George Link
Format: Digital, 16:9, Color
Runtime: 56 Minutes
