Heiners Filmseiten – I’m Glad That My Mother Is Alive (en)

I’m Glad That My Mother Is Alive (Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante)

German title: Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante (Ich bin froh, dass meine Mutter lebt)
Russian title: Я счастлив, что моя мать жива
Original title: Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante

Alternative titles:
I’m Glad My Mother Is Alive

Family drama – France
Production year: 2008
Movie length: 90 minutes

Director: Claude Miller, Nathan Miller
Writer: Claude Miller, Nathan Miller, Emmanuel Carrère

Movie description:

Unbeknownst to his adoptive parents, troubled 20 year-old Thomas searches for his birth mother who abandoned him and his brother when they were very young. He finds her single, with a small child, living in a nearby suburb and introduces himself to her. Traumatized by years of emptiness and longing for his mother, he starts an ambiguous relationship with her, part courtship part obsession, which slowly drives him to an act of madness ...

A man tries to make sense of his relationship with the woman who gave birth to him in this drama co-directed by Claude Miller and his son Nathan Miller. When he was five years old, Thomas Jouvet and his brother Patrick were abandoned by their mother Julie, without any clue of why she chose to walk away from them. While Thomas was adopted by a caring couple, Yves and Annie, young Thomas became an angry and rebellious kid, and he found himself shipped off to a boarding school after too many fistfights with his classmates. Deciding he needs to confront his mother about what happened when he was five, teenage Thomas slips away from school and manages to obtain Julie’s address, but when he sees her, he’s too shaken to talk and simply walks away. It’s not until Thomas is a grown man working in an auto repair shop that he works up the nerve to introduce himself to Julie in hopes of making his way back into her life, though by this time she has another young son that she’s looking after on her own. »Je suis heureux que ma mere soit vivante« (aka »I’m Glad That My Mother Is AliveÂ«) received its world premiere at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival.

Boy Actors