From cradle to grave, from perfect to painful, the story of the mother-daughter bond is explored in intimate detail and epic scope; revealing a core experience within every woman’s life. From over 500 interviews, the film follows 40 women and girls in key moments of the mother-daughter relationship, including a remarkably diverse group of American women of every age, race, and experience. From birth to death, these stories from ordinary American women define the mother-daughter bond as it endures and changes over a lifetime.
Minute by minute, we see a series of moving individual mother/daughter stories; yet by the end, the cumulative effect reveals a universal mother-daughter story that is true for us all: the cycle of life, a repeating pattern of comings together and drawings apart; the union of pregnancy followed by the separation of birth; the sweet closeness of childhood to the stormy estrangement of adolescence; the reconciliation and sharing during adulthood yielding to aging, passing away and eventually to the renewal of the coming of next generation.