I'm Glad That My Mother Is Alive

I saw I'm Glad That My Mother Is Alive at the Union Theatre on Friday. I wasn't planning on watching it, because from the descriptions I had read, it seemed like a predictable story about an adopted boy who goes to find his birth mother and is disappointed. However, after watching the opening scene and seeing how beautifully the film was shot, I kept watching. The film was unexpected and had a lot more intense emotions involved that I thought it would. Not only is this boy feeling detached from his adoptive family and is longing for his birth mother, but once he finds her, he has some rather strange feelings towards her. It's almost as if he is trying to date his mother. His Mom has a younger son about 5 years old that lives with her, and at one point the innocent boy calls the two "lovebirds". In one scene, he sees his Mom kiss her ex boyfriend, and he gets very jealous and interrogates her on her. He builds up anger and jeaously about her abandoning him, not taking care of him once he finds her, and going to other men, and then finally gets so angry when she starts to come onto him that he stabs her, intending to murder her. While part of him had some bizarre fantasy with wanting her, he saw her coming onto him as being a bad mother, as she always had been. The film ends with a court scene where his mother, who had survived the stabbing, asks the court not to punish him, but since he had attempted murder, he gets sentenced to 3 years in prison. When I was a kid, one of my parents went through a series of partners, and I had a lot of resentment and jealously attached to it, because it took focus away from me, so I understood how the young man felt.