My Life Without Me (2003)

[First para. of encyclopaedia entry]: "My Life Without Me, a Spanish film made with Canadian and American actors and filmed in English belongs to a spate of recent films from Spain that have offered representations of angelic mothers. Critics have argued that these films respond to a complex history of representing women in Spain as symbols of the state in which, in the Franco and post-Franco eras, mothers were alternately glorified and punished. Currently, a ‘pro-natalist’ discourse has again arisen in Spanish culture that is reacting to the previous generation’s attacks on motherhood by investing in a project of redeeming the family in the service of a new picture of the nation."