Absorbing documentary Love & Stuff screening on POV beginning September 5 -- Asks 'What do we really want to leave our children?'

Peabody Award-winning director Judith Helfand reckons with her mother’s belongings following her death, via decades of family home videos in the absorbing Love & Stuff. The documentary will make its national broadcast premiere on POV, Monday, September 5, 2022 (check local listings), available to stream through December 4, 2022 at pbs.org, and the PBS Video app.

In Love & Stuff, veteran filmmaker Helfand harnesses every bit of her signature first-person style and heimish gallows humor to face a universally gut wrenching reality – imagining life without her mother – who faces imminent death from terminal cancer much sooner than later.

After one week of ritual mourning known as shiva, Helfand must come to terms with a new reality. She and her brothers begin the arduous task of going through all their mothers’ stuff. While time is not on Helfand’s side, 25 years worth of archival family footage-turned-cinematic portal is – and in the wake of her mother’s death – it becomes a means of connecting the love to the “stuff" and one generation to the next.

Helfand had been striving to adopt a baby in the year before her mothers’ health totally declined. Instead, seven months to the day her mother died, when she is in the deepest of grief, she gets the call that will turn her into an instant “old new" [single] mom to a much-longed-for newborn. At nearly 50 years old, a half century older than her baby girl, that dreaded question, “How do you live without your mother?” takes on new meaning, pushing Helfand to explore, face, and deal with – a lot of love, a lot of stuff – and ask the ultimate question: "What do we really want to leave our children?"

Smarthouse Creative is proud to be a marketing partner for the distribution of Love & Stuff, which was produced by Judith Helfand Productions, Medalia Productions and Secret Sauce Media and Artemis Rising Foundation in co-production with American Documentary. Judith Helfand is the director, the producers are Helfand, Hilla Medalia and Julie Parker Benello. Marina Katz is editor with David Cohen is also a co-director. The executive producers are Erika Dilday and Chris White for American Documentary, Regina K. Scully, Jenny Raskin, Susan Margolin, Megan Gelstein, Nancy Blachman, Sarah Cavanaugh, Dan Cogan and Geralyn White Dreyfous along with Abigail Disney, who is a contributing producer.