After 17 years of documenting her friend – Michael Moskowitz’s personal struggle to heal from a generational wound by filming his intimate therapy sessions, Quirijns also turns the camera on herself to reveal her own family’s devastating trauma before she was born – the sudden loss of an older sister she never knew in a tragic accidental drowning. As she speaks to her parents for the first time about their loss, raw conversations and the process of the family’s therapy is shared in a poignant insight into healing after tragedy. Your Mum and Dad deftly navigates the consequences of the accident for all involved, even Klaartje’s daughters a generation later, as the director hopes to lead by example with frank and empathetic discussions about mental health.

In Czechoslovakia before the upheaval of World War Two, Michael Moskowitz’s Jewish mother left home at seventeen without knowing if she would ever see her family again. What followed was a lifetime of trauma and dislocation for both her and her son. Allowed into the inner sanctum of the therapy room, filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns follows Moskowitz’s work with a New York-based therapist named Dr Kirkland Vaughans. Vaughans – one of the few African-American Freudian therapists in the United States - guides us through the complex workings of the mind, showing how easily we can be “colonised” by the behaviour of our parents. But in explaining these recurring patterns, he can’t help but be drawn into exploring his own painful past as well.

Using a wealth of home movies and archival images – as well as taped therapy sessions – Your Mum and Dad explores recurring behavioural themes and raises individual cases into a universal pattern of experience. These stories enter the minds of the viewers and provide a mirror with which they can see the pain and triumphs of their own lives.

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