Echoes of Her:
To Mom, With Love
The Documentary
Coming SPRING 2027
Director’s Note
There are some losses that divide your life into two parts: before and after.
For me, losing my mother changed everything.
What began as personal grief slowly revealed itself to be something much larger — a shared experience carried quietly by so many women navigating loss, identity, motherhood, trauma, memory, and survival. I started noticing how often conversations about grief were rushed, minimized, or hidden behind phrases like “stay strong” and “time heals all wounds.” But grief does not move in straight lines, and healing rarely happens in silence.
Echoes of Her was born from that understanding.
This documentary is an exploration of what remains after loss. It is about the echoes our mothers leave behind — in our laughter, our fears, our habits, our resilience, our relationships, and the women we are still becoming. Through intimate conversations and shared experiences, this film creates space for honesty around grief and the lifelong impact of losing a mother.
As a storyteller, I have spent years helping others share their voices through media, journalism, and production. But this project required something different from me. It required vulnerability. It required me to sit with difficult memories and ask other women to trust me with theirs. What I found in return was profound: connection, truth, and community.
While grief is at the center of this documentary, so is love. Love that continues after someone is gone. Love that shapes us. Love that survives memory, distance, silence, and time.
My hope is that Echoes of Her helps people feel seen. That it starts conversations families are often afraid to have. That it reminds those navigating grief that there is no “right” way to mourn, heal, or remember.
Most importantly, I hope this film honors the women whose presence still echoes through our lives every single day.
Thank you for being here and for supporting this journey.
— Adell Coleman
Director, Echoes of Her
Meet the Team
Mike DuBose
Creative Director
Berachah DuBose
Assistant Director & Social Media Strategist
Faye Brown
Fundraising Strategist
A character-driven documentary exploring how Black women navigate grief after the loss of their mothers—and the unspoken expectations that shape how that grief is carried.
Interwoven with the individual narratives are intimate group sessions where Black women gather to share their stories, expanding the film beyond the four central participants to reflect a broader collective experience. Within these spaces, vulnerability transforms isolation into connection, revealing shared patterns of grief, resilience, and healing. What emerges is a powerful communal portrait of Black women collectively holding and witnessing one another through mother loss.
Andrea Cambron
Assistant Director
Kadesh DuBose
Director of Photography
Athena Williams
Production Assistant
William Haywood
Production Supervisor
The Journey
At the heart of the film is Adell’s personal journey. After her mother’s death, she was immediately thrust into the role of “the reliable one,” expected to support others while suppressing her own grief. For years, that grief remained delayed, shaped by trauma and the pressure to embody the “strong Black woman.”
Through the making of this film, Adell is forced to confront her loss in ways she never has before. As she connects with the other women, she begins to unpack the trauma surrounding her mother’s death, recover buried memories, and challenge the patterns that kept her disconnected from her own healing. What begins as a search for answers in others becomes an unexpected and deeply personal reckoning.
This journey raises central questions that guide the film:
What space are Black women truly given to grieve?
How does the expectation of being the “strong Black woman” interrupt or delay healing?
How does grief reshape family dynamics, and in some cases, create rupture?
What does it mean to confront trauma years after loss and is healing still possible?
In the absence of mothers, how do these women redefine identity, family, and self?
As Adell connects with each participant, the film becomes both an exploration and an unfolding discovery. The group sessions evolve into more than shared storytelling they become a site of collective healing, where community is not just found, but actively built.
However, key elements of the story remain open and evolving:
Will Andrea and her brother find reconciliation, or will grief permanently alter their relationship?
Will Jasmine uncover any sense of clarity or peace around her mother’s death?
How will Tina redefine herself beyond the role of caregiver?
And for Adell, what does it mean to finally face the trauma of her mother’s murder and who does she become on the other side of that confrontation?
Echoes of Her: To Mom, With Love is constructed as an intimate, interwoven narrative blending personal testimony, vérité moments, and collective dialogue to examine not just loss, but what it means to rebuild, reconnect, and ultimately face what has long gone unspoken.
