MOMMA & ME makes use of Nettie’s and Natalie’s loving, yet complicated mother/daughter relationship to explore the beauty standard – and how it’s complicated by aging – to better understand themselves and ultimately each other. By both celebrating and investigating Nettie’s history to inform an understanding of Natalie’s own history, and the ways the two women’s stories meet, intersect, and take on their own trajectories, MOMMA & ME uncovers the public messaging that American culture promotes about Black women, especially regarding beauty, and the often private internalization of the resulting stigma and shame that comes from tired tropes and myths. In so doing, MOMMA & ME humanizes Nettie and Natalie as individual Black women, but also as a reflection of the collective humanity of Black women working to heal and thrive in a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, to quote author and Black feminist bell hooks.

Director | Natalie Bullock Brown
Facebook | Facebook.com/baartmanbeyonceandme