Love Your Mama

This independent debut feature from Chicago filmmaker Ruby L. Oliver is straight-up, sincere, and non-preachy enough to give inspirational films a good name. LOVE YOUR MAMA dramatizes how one iron-willed mother holds a crisis-wracked black urban family together during the worst of times.

The title character (Audrey Morgan) is named Lucia Brown but the credits bill her simply and archetypically as Mama. Even by ghetto standards the Browns have hard luck; husband/stepfather Sam (Earnest Rayford III) is an unemployable, self-pitying drunk who cheats openly and infects the deeply religious Lucia with gonorrhea. Eldest son Wren (Andre Robinson), who works as a car ...