Lake Travis FF 2021 Interview: MOM & M’s Jena Burchick talks about inserting herself and her camera in the middle of a family in order to make a film

Jena Burchick’s MOM & M, which just screened at the Lake Travis Film Festival is the most “naturalistic” and casual documentaries you’ll see in awhile.  Nikki, a transgender writer and Elise, a social media influencer navigate coming out and the transformation of their lives and life together while also caring for a child from Romania they have adopted who has been battling leukemia since her birth.

Got all that? It’s a lot, right? It would make for one of those weepy TV dramas like This is Us, that people get participant ribbons for based on how much they cry per episode. But this film makes us Nikki and Elise’s neighbors or good enough friends that we hang out at their place with them with them feeling pressure to clean the place up. That’s what’s special about the film is that we, the audience, are afforded an opportunity to have access to their lives and difficulties with bigoted he-men fathers and the like, not to mention the taking on of the responsibility for a child’s daily care that is in remission one moment and, then not the next moment. If any film will give you proper perspective without histrionics – this one will.

In the interview, we talked about what it’s like to be in the middle of a family fraught with real world issues and problems, etc. with your camera and yet, not disrupting the flow of life with your presence. Jena also talks about trying to capture what was going on with the child in the room, yet not lose the film’s focus while doing so. She also discusses how and what inspired the film growing from an intended short to the feature-length project it eventually became.