My Mother

My Mother My Mother was strong and intelligent. She was passionate and stoic, progressive yet traditional, poised yet angry. Mom was many things to many people. My friends envied me my 'cool Mom'. To me she was strict but fair. Though she never admitted it, she brought us up as a single parent. Sometimes Dad would venture off to India and forget to put money in the bank. Mom would go out and always bring back the editing work that she needed to do on her 16mm moviola that was set up in our home.

We moved frequently when I was a kid and Mom always let me miss the maximum amount of sick days allowed. I would count them up carefully on my report card. I would read books in my room or draw pictures, while Mom edited her films in the lab. I could hear the films playing backwards and forwards while she worked.

My favorite moments with my Mom were at the big parties my parents used to have. Mom would cook giant pots of food for days and invite lots of people over. There was always an overabundance of drink and cigarette smoke with lots of intense conversation and debate. As a child I used to love falling asleep right in the middle of it. Sometimes Mom would gently scratch my head as I rested it on her lap.

Mom burned all her diaries before she passed away from cancer. She was a lady to the end, taking her secrets with her to the grave. I wish she had shared more of her secrets with me. Maybe I would have been less angry with her. Now I understand how challenging her life was, always picking up the pieces for Dad, never complaining about him to us. But sometimes she was boiling mad inside. We kids took the brunt of her anger sometimes, without really understanding why. Making this film made me understand her a lot better.

The clearest words of advice I remember from Mom while growing up was when I was twelve years old. She vehemently stated, "Nina - never rely on a man for your survival!" It kind of came out of nowhere. We were cleaning the house at the time.


When I first moved in with my boyfriend, a cameraman, after college ended, Mom asked me why I was with him. I told him that we liked to work together. Her vehement response was "then work with him, don't live with him!" I didn't understand that she just didn't want me to repeat the pattern of her own life. If only she had explained her statement, but that was all she said. I think I could have learned a lot more from her if she opened up to me.

Mom was trapped between two generations. She was fiercely independent, string willed and a free thinker. But she was constrained by her strict Lutheran upbringing. In her Calgary high school she won two university scholarships - in mathematics and music composition, but her father would only permit her to study domestic sciences. Mom attended the Royal College of Alberta but she wanted more.

Mom escaped her restricting home environment by marrying a young officer named Coventry. He headed off to war shortly after they were married. She got a job with the Calgary Power Company and threw herself into volunteer work to support the war effort. In 1942 she made her way to Ottawa with a mission to join the National Film Board of Canada. Grierson accepted her into the Negative Cutting Department and she worked her way through the ranks of Technical Services to become the Editor-in-Chief and then on to Production, where she was a Location Manager, Editor, Assistant Director, and Budget Officer. Sometime during this period Mom's first marriage ended. I don't know much about it because Mom certainly never told her kids about it. I only discovered she had been previously married when at the age of sixteen, a new neighbour moved in across the street who happened to have worked at the NFB in the early days - a photographer named Art Roberts. When he saw my Mom, he exclaimed, "Margaret Coventry, how good to see you!" Needless to say I was intrigued!

Mom and Dad began their romance as Dad's disastrous marriage to NFB Director Jane Marsh was ending. Though the dates are a little fuzzy, when Dad was transferred to London in 1954, Mom had a dream that she and Dad flew on a big plane to India, and felt compelled to write a letter to Dad about it. Mom definitely had a prescient moment. My brother and I were born in India a few years later.

Mom and Dad were both transformed by their experiences in India in the 1950's. As I grew up, we ate Indian food, discussed Indian politics at the dinner table and had many Indian guests stay at our home. They never forgot India. In my teens, Mom sent me to an Indian boarding school and tried her best to encourage me to marry an Indian and move there forever.

Though my mother was a private person, while researching and interviewing for this film, I found my Dad to be frustratingly enigmatic. I could not find out much about his personal life at all. It seemed as if he truly was a Zen Master, or a Guru. Everyone seemed to love him from afar. The closest I came to the truth was our last day in India, when my Mom's best friend in Delhi, Meenakshi Devi, told me what she could (or was willing to share) about Mom & Dad's relationship.


"Put it this way, Nina, it was lucky you were born" Meenakshi said. Suffice it to say, there were some serious intimacy issues between my parents. I know my Mom tried to seek solace with another man - Jamal Kidwai - in Delhi - but he proved to be frustratingly unattainable too. I cried my eyes out my last day in Delhi - feeling the weight of my mother's unrequited love and the sorrow caused by her intense desire for creative fulfillment.

I knew that Dad wasn't a faithful husband. The closest my Mom came to telling me this was when she was dying of cancer and she told me that "Sometimes he didn't come home at night." Given that my Dad spent most of his life working away from home, I didn't know if she was referring to the fact that he traveled all the time - or that he was unfaithful. My question to Mom then was, "Why did you stay with him?" and her response was "He was so charming!" Never underestimate the power of charm. My Dad was a master at it!

It wasn't until after I finished this film that one of Dad's closest colleagues called me from New York and spilled the beans. He told me that Dad always had at least one girlfriend on the side, and that "everyone did it back then". It was obvious that Mom chose to deal with Dad's transgressions in the old fashioned way - privately. But her advice to Dad's friend when he took Dad off to India for a film shoot was darkly humorous, "Look after the man that you have hired and take care that he should not get involved with loose legged ladies."