Daughters and mothers: motherhood, memory and the intergenerational transmission of women’s experience

This article examines the transformation of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships in contemporary Kazakh cinema, focusing on films made by women directors. Placing recent works within the broader history of Soviet and post-Soviet Kazakh cinema, it traces the evolution of motherhood from a social function and predetermined female destiny to a space of choice, conflict and reinterpretation. Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s distinction between motherhood as institution and as experience, as well as Nancy Chodorow’s theory of the intergenerational reproduction of mothering, the article analyses Sharipa Urazbayeva’s Mental Loneliness (2023), Zhannat Alshanova’s Becoming (2025), and Zaka Abdrakhmanova’s Dad Croaked on Saturday (2024). It includes earlier works in order to identify the principal stages in the cinematic representation of motherhood: as impossibility, as a source of strength and resistance, as a rejected maternal script, and as a negotiation between female freedom and responsibility. The article argues that daughters in contemporary Kazakh cinema no longer perceive their mothers’ lives as an inevitable model for their own future. They may accept, reject or reinterpret the experience they inherit. Memory continues to connect generations of women, but no longer determines their destiny. At the intersection of continuity and rupture, a new form of female subjectivity emerges.