The film Holding Moses, about a queer mom and her disabled son, is a contender for Best Documentary Short at the Academy Awards. Watch the 17-minute film, from two queer mom filmmakers, here.
Holding Moses, directed by Rivkah Beth Medow and produced and co-directed by Jen Rainin, is the story of Broadway performer and attorney Randi Rader and her son Moses, who was born with a rare genetic disorder called Phelan-McDermid Syndrome, which impacts both his physical and intellectual systems. The official synopsis tells us that when Randi learned Moses was profoundly disabled:
Randi fell into a well of grief before unearthing a new language by which to learn and love her son—one born and honed in the body. Randi’s story laces together family, queerness and disability with vulnerability. Hers is a parenting journey we rarely speak openly about in our culture.
Rainin and Medow first collaborated on the feature documentary Ahead of the Curve, about Rainin’s wife Franco Stevens and her creation of queer women’s magazine Curve. They then created Frankly Speaking Films “to tell mesmerizing stories about strong queer women and non-binary people.”
Holding Moses is their latest effort. Medow said in a Director’s Statement that the film “is especially intimate for me. I’m in an open marriage with an incredible husband, Randi is my girlfriend, and Moses is her son.” They met at a mutual friend’s Hanukkah party; a few years later, Medow explained, “I faced a very deep grief of my own and became a caregiver. I wanted to know everything about how Randi had moved through her grief around birthing Moses and becoming both mother and caregiver; I thought it would hold a possible path to becoming the person I desperately wanted to be to meet my situation.” The audio track for the film began as Randi simply talking to Medow.
Medow and Rainin screened the film with “parents of kids with impairments, disabled adults, queer families, rare disease organizations, and fellow filmmakers,” Rainin said in press materials. “What we heard was how common the feelings of overwhelm that Randi shares in the film are and how taboo it is to ever express them.”
Medow added:
Caregivers are a deeply invisible community and often feel that taking up space for themselves is selfish, inappropriate or unacceptable. I know this as a caregiver myself, from witnessing Randi over the past four years, and from joining this community of millions. I’ve also learned that by naming our own truths fully we can help dispel the saint-or-shame narrative, interrogate our own ableism, and ultimately deepen our capacity to learn and love authentically.
She also explained:
Our desire for viewers to see Moses as a full spectrum human with the capacity to feel both joy and pain guided our lens and the footage we included…. It was critical for us to avoid using our lens to highlight the traumas around Moses’ care and to situate the journey of ableism squarely inside of Randi.
Ronni Blumenthal, executive director of the Phelan-McDermid Syndrome Foundation, has called the film a “gift,” saying, “Thank you for giving people permission and validation to express and feel all the complexities of raising atypical children.”
The film has already won awards at several major film festivals and has qualified for Best Documentary Short at the upcoming Academy Awards. [Update, 12/21/2022: It has been shortlisted for the award!] I loved it for all of the reasons above and for its quiet additional message that a masculine-of-center mother is no less a mother.
The film is being streamed free courtesy of The New Yorker. Watch: