Mother's Day at Metrograph: Imitation of Life

Director: Douglas Sirk

1959 / 125min / 4K DCP

Mom took you to your first movies, so what better occasion to pay her back than by taking her to our screening of Imitation of Life, one of the most wrenching portraits of maternal love ever set down on celluloid, for Mother’s Day? Juanita Moore and Lana Turner star as two single New York City mothers—one Black, one white—who pool their resources to together face an unforgiving world, only to find that material comfort isn’t enough to insulate them from the pains of their daughters’ heartbreaks, which both are helpless to alleviate. A visually extravagant, emotionally overwhelming experience, dismissed by highbrows as soapy melodrama on its release but since recognized as groundbreaking in its treatment of race, class, and sex in America.